Agreed. Sony has a long way to go to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves over the last decade+ of customer abuse and outright criminal activity (the kind that directly impacts people, too: rootkits on PCs). This announcement has moved them a tiny bit upward in my books, but only time will tell. I'm happy to reward a company that changes its tune for the better, but Sony has to demonstrate a lot of good will before I'll give them another chance.
Sony's OtherOS fiasco led fairly directly to their whole online network being down for ages, their info customer's info getting extracted, and various other Bad Things (cheating in a bunch of their online games where it had previously been absent, for example). It affected everybody who used PSN, or who had bought a game using the console, or who played any of the impacted games. It was a very big deal.
Civ Rev is a pretty great game... for a mobile device. In terms of "Civilization game technology" - that is, the advancements to the core game design and so forth - it's at least a decade out of date compared to the PC versions. In terms of "giving you the Civilization experience that people who know the franchise are looking for", it doesn't come close to Alpha Centauri, Civ 4, or Civ 5 (all of which are pretty different games, and all of which have fans who will tell you that it's the Best One Ever). The game play is dumbed down to avoid the steep-ish learning curve of the other games, but that means you can max out your skills in it relatively early. The UI is simplified in ways that are actually fairly nice and clever, except that they offer almost no ability to *do* things. Units can move, attack, and defend. Great People can use their special ability when in a city. Settlers can make new cities. Thats... just about it.
TL;DR: CivRev is a great substitute for a real Civ game when on a mobile device (I have no idea why you'd play in on the Xbox; I'd consider it a waste on anything bigger than my phone), but it's not a "real" Civ in the same sense that the GP meant.
I know people like to "forget" there was anything between XP and Win7, but the automatic driver detection and loading from Windows Update was actually one of the features I loved on Vista. I haven't installed drivers off a CD in many, many years.
I believe he meant phone as in smartphone (or tablet). I hack my phone, and occasionally hack *on* my phone, all the time, in the MIT sense. Phreaking is entirely different; that's hacking the phone system.
Wy spend $400? Mine $298, DHL Express shipped (two days from Seoul to the US west coast), and they even included the AC plug adapter (mains adaptor to our overseas friends). Seller had many thousands of positive reviews; it was one of the best transactions I've ever made online.
Y'all much have really fat fingers... I used Win7 on a smaller (and higher PPI) touchscreen than that one. Win8's a breeze by comparison, and I avoid Metra stuff anyhow!
I''ve literally not once used the optical drive in that work machine; ISOs and bootable flashdrives are much more convenient and all the software I need is downloadable anyhow. The ethernet I rarely use, but if I needed it on a device the doesn't have it (like my tablet), I'd grab a USB NIC.
WiFi is fine if you run it through a VPN, which is required for my work anyhow.
Because it's not a desktop. It's a giant portable (laptop/tablet/whatever - in this case, tablet) which can be set up on a desk. The common term for this class of device is "desktop replacement" and implies high-end laptop specs plus a large screen, intended to remove the need for an actual desktop while still being something you can put in a backpack or briefcase and take on a plane, or remove from your desk and take to a meeting, or walk across the office to show something to a co-worker, or take to lunch so you can continue working while you eat if you're in a time crunch, or... you get the idea. They're popular among college students as well; they don't take up much space in a classroom or dorm room, but have generous screens (compared to the typical 12-16" laptop screen).
My last computer (lasted me 3.5 years as my primary machine) was an 18" desktop replacement laptop. It weighed almost 9lb (far more than this thing), lacked a touchscreen, and had poor specs by desktop standards. On the other hand, it could run for a few hours (typically 2-3 real-world usage, which gets you through a class or two no sweat) on battery, was a trivial item to move when going home for the holidays or moving to a new apartment, and was fantastic for LAN parties.
This is just the logical extension of that trend. Touchscreen but no built-in keyboard to reduce weight (although you can of course grab any bluetooth or small USB keyboard to use with it). Battery life is nothing special but it's not *supposed* to be an all-day portable. Screen is huge for a portable but nothing exciting for a desktop, except that it's intended to be placed nearer to you on the desk and still has great resolution, so the effective viewing area and viewing angle are the same (and it's easier to use touch when you want to.
It's a niche market, but if I was looking for another machine like my old laptop, I'd be very interested.
A 21" screen without touch, in a vastly more heavy case that doesn't have a battery, in a machine that can't be operated without (realistically) both mouse and keyboard.
I don't deny that Apple doesn't have any equivalent of this thing, and thus the GP's post was silly, but that base model iMac costs almost as much and yet is missing all of the things that are designed to appeal about this computer. It really is a giant tablet which is designed to also be used like a desktop (contrast with the Surface Pro, a tiny laptop / slightly thick tablet).
With that said, the iMac (or almost any other AIO) has better specs for the price. This is not a computer you buy because you want a desktop that you might have to move sometimes. It's much more aimed at being the new Desktop Replacement laptop (I have a 4-year-old 18" laptop; it weighs almost twice what this thing does and lacks a touchscreen).
I recently visited San Francisco, where I noted a *huge* number of billboards for iPads. Ads everywhere. OK, I'm not used to quite that much billboard-spam, but whatever. What I couldn't figure out was who Apple was targeting here; doesn't everybody in the bay area with an interest in an iPad and the money to buy one already have one?
Then I figured it out: all the ads show an iPad and an iPad Mini side-by-side, frequently with a message about them complementing eachother. The target wasn't people who don't have an iPad; the target was people who only have one iPad!
I install an app. It has a manifest saying it supports the "default browser" profile or something like that. The app store / OS (not the app itself!) asks me if I want to make it the default. I choose yes or no. If I choose yes, then behind the scenes, the app is configured to be the handler for http/https/etc. Life goes on. Somewhere in the OS there's a tool for changing such defaults, but apps themselves can't even *tell* whether or not they are the default.
Umm... no, we haven't. Existing all-in-one desktop PCs, or even 18" (~45cm) laptops, have weighed way more than 5lb (about 2.3kg). Usually more than twice that; 11-20lb (5-9 kg) is more common amon AIOs. Even if they were designed with a carrying handle, they were not designed with portability in mind; the handle was to make it easier to get the from the box to the desk. Additionally, while consumer touchscreen monitors have existed for a while now, they haven't generally been designed for any kind of portability either.
This thing weighs only a little more than my work laptop (which is admittedly a beast, but I carry it around a lot) without its power brick, and a lot less than my old (9lb) 18" "desktop replacement" laptop. Neither of those have touch, either, meaning they need space for a keyboard when in use and it's hard for more than one person to interact with one at any given time.
No, the fourth could cover that nicely. Probable cause is required for a search or an arrest, so classify asking questions about crime a type of search (a search of one's intellectual property, to use an existing legal term). If the police want to search your brain (or your encrypted hard disk partition), make them obtain a warrant to do so. If they Do obtain said warrant, it is your legal obligation to allow them to do so.
The fourth amendment prohibits *unlawful* search and seizure. Warrants exist to make such search and seizure lawful. If the fifth amendment is an extension of the fourth, and the fourth amendment allows me to obtain a warrant to seize and search your physical property, why does the fifth offer no such option?
Or, perhaps the fourth and the fifth are actually different things after all, and the GP's post is just complete bullshit for attempting to equate them?
Except, that's totally not deserving of +5, because it equates two things that are not equal. Logical fallacies don't get a lot more simple than that.
Search and seizure is lawful (or not) based on the justification, or probable cause to believe that a crime occurred, which is documented via the acquisition of a warrant (which must be obtained searching or seizing). Why, if I (an agent of law enforcement*) have sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant to search the contents of your filing cabinets, can I not obtain a warrant to search the contents of your files? If destroying a hard disk instead of turning it over to the authorities who are serving a search warrant considered destroying evidence, why are you permitted to destroy (from law enforcement's point of view) the contents of that hard disk when you have the ability to produce them? If you can be forced to turn over all your physical possessions (including video tapes showing you murdering people, which certainly will incriminate you), why can't you forced to turn over all your electronic possessions (including video files showing you murdering people)? If you have the encryption key, the plaintext version of those files are still in your possession; why can't I serve a warrant on them?
* Note: I don't actually work in law enforcement. However, I have previously aided forensic investigation of a hard disk image.
Except, there is knowledge of a crime, and evidence that you committed it may reside in that hard drive's data just as surely as it may reside in your fingerprints' unique pattern. If they have a warrant (which implies probable cause to search) for your digital data, how is that different from having a warrant for your arrest and fingerprinting / blood sampling? They already know a crime occurred, and the approximate location of it (which might be based on a virtual location, such as "one of the computers connected to the Internet through the IP address that was assigned to the router in this house").
How is being forced to give up some of your blood to see if it matches blood found near a crime scene any less a case of "information which might incriminate me" than being forced to give up the encryption key to a storage device to see if it contains data which was traced to a location (electronically) near a crime scene (where "crime scene" means the exact place and time that the crime occurred, and which the police cannot always determine with pinpoint accuracy?
If all that one could gather from fingerprints and DNA are that you were present, not what you were doing, you *might* have a point. However, that's not the case. Matching your DNA to that found under the fingernails of a murder victim shows that you were probably fighting. Downloaded material (which may or many not be child pornography) which matches content from a site that purports to host child pornography shows that you were probably (not guaranteed; it could have been somebody else using your computer or something) downloading it. If you do not have the right to conceal the evidence that you were fighting a murder victim, why should you have the right to conceal the evidence that you were downloading from a CP site?
Um... no. The point of the fifth amendment is very clearly to protect the innocent (note that I'm speaking in terms of society, not in terms of individuals, although in many cases what is good for the individual is also good for society). The idea being that torture and other forms of coercion are detrimental to society as a whole, even if they don't lead to false positives (convicting the innocent, which history shows they actually will) and do lead to a reduction of false negatives (fewer criminals go free). The fifth amendment can also protect against excessive prosecution of the guilty, such as torturing somebody to obtain a confession for stealing the proverbial loaf of bread.
Any law which protects the guilty (as a group, not in terms of an individual) more than the innocent (as a group, i.e. law-abiding society as a whole) is quite obviously a bad law. A law which protects a guilty individual more than it protects an innocent individual might still be a good law, because there are a lot more innocent individuals than guilty ones and therefore the overall effect is a net positive. However, the goal of such a law is to protect the innocent, not the guilty. As soon as you start arguing for laws whose purpose is to protect the guilty (note: this is distinct from "the accused") at the expense of the innocent, you have lost sight of the point of having law.
There are some problems with the arguments for the fifth amendment as it currently stands, though: First, there are better ways to protect against torture and other excessive forms of prosecution. In fact, many such things are already illegal regardless of the fifth amendment (and this doesn't stop the government anyhow; see the OP's criteria #1). Second, the fifth amendment in its current state does permit plea bargaining, which is a mechanism used by overzealous prosecutors to convict many innocent people who cannot afford a proper defense and prefer to serve a reduced sentence rather than have their finances wiped out to fight a case that they may still lose, even though they are innocent. That is undeniably harmful to society, but prosecutors nonetheless get away with it.
For example, requiring police to have a warrant before searching absolutely benefits the guilty more than the innocent but you're not arguing to do away with search warrants.
You're going to have to justify that one. Warrantless searches occupy the time of both law enforcement and of the party being searched (unless you can justify a claim that most people being searched would be guilty of something serious enough that it's worth law enforcement's time to deal with it, then such searches both impair law enforcement and waste the time of the innocent). Searches can be used as a form of harassment, applied selectively to "legitimately" abuse police power. Searches can cause damage to property (of the innocent).
Unrestricted search would make things "easier" for the police, but it would not (in my opinion) benefit the innocent more than guilty, even factoring in the benefit that the innocent derive from having fewer criminals at large. Self-incrimination, when the police already have evidence that you're guilty and are now seeking proof, is not the same thing and should be discussed separately.
The rules put in place - specifically, the second rule where the world without such protection must be better than the world with such protection - does not hold for the scenario you constructed. Therefore, your scenario is invalid as a counterargument to abolishing the fifth amendment.
Scenario 5: They find something harmful, such as an (illegal) bomb that they knew somebody had acquired materials to build but hadn't been able to pinpoint. Your guilty ass is arrested, but a lot of innocent people and a bunch of property is *not* blown up.
Scenario 6: They find an unusual number of laptops / TVs / etc. stowed in some bags the trunk. They check the serial numbers and discover that several of them were reported as stolen. Your guilty ass gets arrested, but I get my stuff back (eventually) and can sue you for damage caused when you broke into my house.
The purpose of laws is to benefit the society, not the individual. While the points you make above are valid, they are also incomplete. Not everybody stopped by the police is innocent.
Now, it's perfectly reasonable to argue that the societal harm of not having the right to refuse a search.is greater than the harm of allowing criminals to go free who could have otherwise been caught, but that's not what you were doing. Your second sentence is only true if "you" refers to the individual and ignores societal costs and benefits.
In any case, "unreasonable search and seizure" is different from "avoid self-incrimination". If the police have a warrant to search you car (which generally removes your right to object to the search), are you of the opinion that you should be able to prevent the search on the basis that to do otherwise would constitute self-incrimination? Because that's... absurd. Basically, your whole argument is, at best, irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Hell, if at all possible, customize your resume for *every* job. A pure Windows shop is unlikely to care how much Linux knowledge I have, so I remove that and use the space to play up my skills in Win-specific areas and soft skills. A non-developer job (for example, security test) may care that I know how to program, but isn't going to be very interested in my knowledge of software development lifecycles and so forth. A job in a leadership role (even if nobody reports to you) requires different soft skills than one where you're part of a team, which in turn requires different skills from one where you work alone.
Customize everything. Don't lie, and do have a good, general-purpose resume that you can use for almost any scenario, but if you really want to get hired you should go the extra mile and at least tweak things for each job where you have the opportunity. Additionally, you definitely need to write cover letters wherever possible. Keep them short, professional, and on topic, and ensure they are as well edited as is practically possible - poor grammar can lead to a mark against you just by making you look sloppy or uneducated - but unless your writing is absolutely terrible, they are well worth the time it takes. You want to stand out from the crowd.
It's the scores that were being posted for students. He only found the way to leak everybody's scores because he was trying to get a friend's scores early, but was unable to do so. The data he got is the data that became available when the final scores were posted.
How is rounding grades to specific points (as opposed to a general curve, which is decidedly not present) anything other than tampering?
69 is a serious local maximum, but 67, 68, 70, and 71 are not given out at all. Similar for 83, and the values on either side of it. There isn't a single result in the range of 55, 56, 57. 80 is a local minimum, among non-zero scores; 78 is a local maximum (79 got zero results). That makes no sense at all.
You can basically fit several lines to the peaks of the data: 35, 38, 40, 42 are all much higher than the tail of such a distribution should be. The shape of the actual tail is visible from 25-30 and 16-20. 50, 54, 58, 60, 66, 69, 78, 88 are all local maxima, and are mostly on a straight line (that just shouldn't happen, not over such a large range, and not including the global maximum). 83 is lower than it should be if the missing numbers on either side were assigned to it. If you assume all the even scores from 88 to 94 were twice as high as they should be because the preceding number was added, then it almost aligns with the curve shown from 95-100. However, why then is 86 so much lower, and 84 missing entirely? That's an unlikely sharpness to a curve.
It's surprising because you know nothing about how this test works.
1. It's a standardized test, the correct answers are not subjective, and there are no re-takes allowed. Who the hell do you complain to about your 1-point-off score? 2. Ensuring a mean and a median are one thing, but these charts don't fit anything even close to a proper distribution. Even if you ignore the missing values, you end up with weird shit like 80 being far less common than 78 and 83 (the two nearest grades that are reported), or the fact that 78 is a local maximum higher than everything between it and 86, but the actual maximum is at 88. 3. Even a trivial degree of intelligent thought would have made it obvious that there aren't enough letter grades for even half of the 1-100 range. Leaving that (and the fact that the test doesn't use letter grades) aside though, there's a perfectly good proof right in the article that such schemes cannot possibly be the reason for the weird scores: you can get any score from 94-100 (though 94 is more than twice as common as 95, which is only a little more common than 96), but you can't get 93. There simply isn't any system where you can lose 0-6 points, or 8 points, or 10 points... but you can't lose 7 points, or 9 points. That just doesn't make sense.
Given your demonstrated lack of reading comprehension and reasoning power, I sure hope *you* have never been a teacher...
That would be believable, if it weren't for the fact that in some places you have pairs of unattainable values (55,56,57 is even a triplet) and in other places you have smooth lines that represent the expected distribution of values (95-100 I pretty reasonable-looking, as is 25-30). There's no way a spreading algorithm not specifically designed to produce bullshit of that nature would leave such a huge gap near the middle of the range, but have smooth regions at the top of the range and near the 27% mark (top and bottom both I might see, but not top and then merely low).
No. If you look at the top-6 stacked graph, it's pretty clearly indicated that a lot of people who should have gotten a 70 got a 69 instead, and perhaps 71 got promoted to 72. A fair stretching algorithm wouldn't produce those weird spikes and dips (even on the all-marks graph, why is 62 so much lower than everything else that even got a score within a range of +/- 5? Why is 72 so much higher than the scores on either side?).
Ascribing to malice, because you simply can't be this incompetent by accident...
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Agreed. Sony has a long way to go to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves over the last decade+ of customer abuse and outright criminal activity (the kind that directly impacts people, too: rootkits on PCs). This announcement has moved them a tiny bit upward in my books, but only time will tell. I'm happy to reward a company that changes its tune for the better, but Sony has to demonstrate a lot of good will before I'll give them another chance.
Sony's OtherOS fiasco led fairly directly to their whole online network being down for ages, their info customer's info getting extracted, and various other Bad Things (cheating in a bunch of their online games where it had previously been absent, for example). It affected everybody who used PSN, or who had bought a game using the console, or who played any of the impacted games. It was a very big deal.
Civ Rev is a pretty great game... for a mobile device. In terms of "Civilization game technology" - that is, the advancements to the core game design and so forth - it's at least a decade out of date compared to the PC versions. In terms of "giving you the Civilization experience that people who know the franchise are looking for", it doesn't come close to Alpha Centauri, Civ 4, or Civ 5 (all of which are pretty different games, and all of which have fans who will tell you that it's the Best One Ever). The game play is dumbed down to avoid the steep-ish learning curve of the other games, but that means you can max out your skills in it relatively early. The UI is simplified in ways that are actually fairly nice and clever, except that they offer almost no ability to *do* things. Units can move, attack, and defend. Great People can use their special ability when in a city. Settlers can make new cities. Thats... just about it.
TL;DR: CivRev is a great substitute for a real Civ game when on a mobile device (I have no idea why you'd play in on the Xbox; I'd consider it a waste on anything bigger than my phone), but it's not a "real" Civ in the same sense that the GP meant.
I know people like to "forget" there was anything between XP and Win7, but the automatic driver detection and loading from Windows Update was actually one of the features I loved on Vista. I haven't installed drivers off a CD in many, many years.
I believe he meant phone as in smartphone (or tablet). I hack my phone, and occasionally hack *on* my phone, all the time, in the MIT sense. Phreaking is entirely different; that's hacking the phone system.
Wy spend $400? Mine $298, DHL Express shipped (two days from Seoul to the US west coast), and they even included the AC plug adapter (mains adaptor to our overseas friends). Seller had many thousands of positive reviews; it was one of the best transactions I've ever made online.
Y'all much have really fat fingers... I used Win7 on a smaller (and higher PPI) touchscreen than that one. Win8's a breeze by comparison, and I avoid Metra stuff anyhow!
I''ve literally not once used the optical drive in that work machine; ISOs and bootable flashdrives are much more convenient and all the software I need is downloadable anyhow. The ethernet I rarely use, but if I needed it on a device the doesn't have it (like my tablet), I'd grab a USB NIC.
WiFi is fine if you run it through a VPN, which is required for my work anyhow.
Because it's not a desktop. It's a giant portable (laptop/tablet/whatever - in this case, tablet) which can be set up on a desk. The common term for this class of device is "desktop replacement" and implies high-end laptop specs plus a large screen, intended to remove the need for an actual desktop while still being something you can put in a backpack or briefcase and take on a plane, or remove from your desk and take to a meeting, or walk across the office to show something to a co-worker, or take to lunch so you can continue working while you eat if you're in a time crunch, or... you get the idea. They're popular among college students as well; they don't take up much space in a classroom or dorm room, but have generous screens (compared to the typical 12-16" laptop screen).
My last computer (lasted me 3.5 years as my primary machine) was an 18" desktop replacement laptop. It weighed almost 9lb (far more than this thing), lacked a touchscreen, and had poor specs by desktop standards. On the other hand, it could run for a few hours (typically 2-3 real-world usage, which gets you through a class or two no sweat) on battery, was a trivial item to move when going home for the holidays or moving to a new apartment, and was fantastic for LAN parties.
This is just the logical extension of that trend. Touchscreen but no built-in keyboard to reduce weight (although you can of course grab any bluetooth or small USB keyboard to use with it). Battery life is nothing special but it's not *supposed* to be an all-day portable. Screen is huge for a portable but nothing exciting for a desktop, except that it's intended to be placed nearer to you on the desk and still has great resolution, so the effective viewing area and viewing angle are the same (and it's easier to use touch when you want to.
It's a niche market, but if I was looking for another machine like my old laptop, I'd be very interested.
A 21" screen without touch, in a vastly more heavy case that doesn't have a battery, in a machine that can't be operated without (realistically) both mouse and keyboard.
I don't deny that Apple doesn't have any equivalent of this thing, and thus the GP's post was silly, but that base model iMac costs almost as much and yet is missing all of the things that are designed to appeal about this computer. It really is a giant tablet which is designed to also be used like a desktop (contrast with the Surface Pro, a tiny laptop / slightly thick tablet).
With that said, the iMac (or almost any other AIO) has better specs for the price. This is not a computer you buy because you want a desktop that you might have to move sometimes. It's much more aimed at being the new Desktop Replacement laptop (I have a 4-year-old 18" laptop; it weighs almost twice what this thing does and lacks a touchscreen).
I recently visited San Francisco, where I noted a *huge* number of billboards for iPads. Ads everywhere. OK, I'm not used to quite that much billboard-spam, but whatever. What I couldn't figure out was who Apple was targeting here; doesn't everybody in the bay area with an interest in an iPad and the money to buy one already have one?
Then I figured it out: all the ads show an iPad and an iPad Mini side-by-side, frequently with a message about them complementing eachother. The target wasn't people who don't have an iPad; the target was people who only have one iPad!
Um... no. Specifically, bullshit.
I install an app. It has a manifest saying it supports the "default browser" profile or something like that. The app store / OS (not the app itself!) asks me if I want to make it the default. I choose yes or no. If I choose yes, then behind the scenes, the app is configured to be the handler for http/https/etc. Life goes on. Somewhere in the OS there's a tool for changing such defaults, but apps themselves can't even *tell* whether or not they are the default.
Umm... no, we haven't. Existing all-in-one desktop PCs, or even 18" (~45cm) laptops, have weighed way more than 5lb (about 2.3kg). Usually more than twice that; 11-20lb (5-9 kg) is more common amon AIOs. Even if they were designed with a carrying handle, they were not designed with portability in mind; the handle was to make it easier to get the from the box to the desk. Additionally, while consumer touchscreen monitors have existed for a while now, they haven't generally been designed for any kind of portability either.
This thing weighs only a little more than my work laptop (which is admittedly a beast, but I carry it around a lot) without its power brick, and a lot less than my old (9lb) 18" "desktop replacement" laptop. Neither of those have touch, either, meaning they need space for a keyboard when in use and it's hard for more than one person to interact with one at any given time.
No, the fourth could cover that nicely. Probable cause is required for a search or an arrest, so classify asking questions about crime a type of search (a search of one's intellectual property, to use an existing legal term). If the police want to search your brain (or your encrypted hard disk partition), make them obtain a warrant to do so. If they Do obtain said warrant, it is your legal obligation to allow them to do so.
The fourth amendment prohibits *unlawful* search and seizure. Warrants exist to make such search and seizure lawful. If the fifth amendment is an extension of the fourth, and the fourth amendment allows me to obtain a warrant to seize and search your physical property, why does the fifth offer no such option?
Or, perhaps the fourth and the fifth are actually different things after all, and the GP's post is just complete bullshit for attempting to equate them?
Except, that's totally not deserving of +5, because it equates two things that are not equal. Logical fallacies don't get a lot more simple than that.
Search and seizure is lawful (or not) based on the justification, or probable cause to believe that a crime occurred, which is documented via the acquisition of a warrant (which must be obtained searching or seizing). Why, if I (an agent of law enforcement*) have sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant to search the contents of your filing cabinets, can I not obtain a warrant to search the contents of your files? If destroying a hard disk instead of turning it over to the authorities who are serving a search warrant considered destroying evidence, why are you permitted to destroy (from law enforcement's point of view) the contents of that hard disk when you have the ability to produce them? If you can be forced to turn over all your physical possessions (including video tapes showing you murdering people, which certainly will incriminate you), why can't you forced to turn over all your electronic possessions (including video files showing you murdering people)? If you have the encryption key, the plaintext version of those files are still in your possession; why can't I serve a warrant on them?
* Note: I don't actually work in law enforcement. However, I have previously aided forensic investigation of a hard disk image.
Except, there is knowledge of a crime, and evidence that you committed it may reside in that hard drive's data just as surely as it may reside in your fingerprints' unique pattern. If they have a warrant (which implies probable cause to search) for your digital data, how is that different from having a warrant for your arrest and fingerprinting / blood sampling? They already know a crime occurred, and the approximate location of it (which might be based on a virtual location, such as "one of the computers connected to the Internet through the IP address that was assigned to the router in this house").
How is being forced to give up some of your blood to see if it matches blood found near a crime scene any less a case of "information which might incriminate me" than being forced to give up the encryption key to a storage device to see if it contains data which was traced to a location (electronically) near a crime scene (where "crime scene" means the exact place and time that the crime occurred, and which the police cannot always determine with pinpoint accuracy?
If all that one could gather from fingerprints and DNA are that you were present, not what you were doing, you *might* have a point. However, that's not the case. Matching your DNA to that found under the fingernails of a murder victim shows that you were probably fighting. Downloaded material (which may or many not be child pornography) which matches content from a site that purports to host child pornography shows that you were probably (not guaranteed; it could have been somebody else using your computer or something) downloading it. If you do not have the right to conceal the evidence that you were fighting a murder victim, why should you have the right to conceal the evidence that you were downloading from a CP site?
Um... no. The point of the fifth amendment is very clearly to protect the innocent (note that I'm speaking in terms of society, not in terms of individuals, although in many cases what is good for the individual is also good for society). The idea being that torture and other forms of coercion are detrimental to society as a whole, even if they don't lead to false positives (convicting the innocent, which history shows they actually will) and do lead to a reduction of false negatives (fewer criminals go free). The fifth amendment can also protect against excessive prosecution of the guilty, such as torturing somebody to obtain a confession for stealing the proverbial loaf of bread.
Any law which protects the guilty (as a group, not in terms of an individual) more than the innocent (as a group, i.e. law-abiding society as a whole) is quite obviously a bad law. A law which protects a guilty individual more than it protects an innocent individual might still be a good law, because there are a lot more innocent individuals than guilty ones and therefore the overall effect is a net positive. However, the goal of such a law is to protect the innocent, not the guilty. As soon as you start arguing for laws whose purpose is to protect the guilty (note: this is distinct from "the accused") at the expense of the innocent, you have lost sight of the point of having law.
There are some problems with the arguments for the fifth amendment as it currently stands, though:
First, there are better ways to protect against torture and other excessive forms of prosecution. In fact, many such things are already illegal regardless of the fifth amendment (and this doesn't stop the government anyhow; see the OP's criteria #1).
Second, the fifth amendment in its current state does permit plea bargaining, which is a mechanism used by overzealous prosecutors to convict many innocent people who cannot afford a proper defense and prefer to serve a reduced sentence rather than have their finances wiped out to fight a case that they may still lose, even though they are innocent. That is undeniably harmful to society, but prosecutors nonetheless get away with it.
For example, requiring police to have a warrant before searching absolutely benefits the guilty more than the innocent but you're not arguing to do away with search warrants.
You're going to have to justify that one. Warrantless searches occupy the time of both law enforcement and of the party being searched (unless you can justify a claim that most people being searched would be guilty of something serious enough that it's worth law enforcement's time to deal with it, then such searches both impair law enforcement and waste the time of the innocent). Searches can be used as a form of harassment, applied selectively to "legitimately" abuse police power. Searches can cause damage to property (of the innocent).
Unrestricted search would make things "easier" for the police, but it would not (in my opinion) benefit the innocent more than guilty, even factoring in the benefit that the innocent derive from having fewer criminals at large. Self-incrimination, when the police already have evidence that you're guilty and are now seeking proof, is not the same thing and should be discussed separately.
The rules put in place - specifically, the second rule where the world without such protection must be better than the world with such protection - does not hold for the scenario you constructed. Therefore, your scenario is invalid as a counterargument to abolishing the fifth amendment.
Devil's advocate, here:
Scenario 5: They find something harmful, such as an (illegal) bomb that they knew somebody had acquired materials to build but hadn't been able to pinpoint. Your guilty ass is arrested, but a lot of innocent people and a bunch of property is *not* blown up.
Scenario 6: They find an unusual number of laptops / TVs / etc. stowed in some bags the trunk. They check the serial numbers and discover that several of them were reported as stolen. Your guilty ass gets arrested, but I get my stuff back (eventually) and can sue you for damage caused when you broke into my house.
The purpose of laws is to benefit the society, not the individual. While the points you make above are valid, they are also incomplete. Not everybody stopped by the police is innocent.
Now, it's perfectly reasonable to argue that the societal harm of not having the right to refuse a search.is greater than the harm of allowing criminals to go free who could have otherwise been caught, but that's not what you were doing. Your second sentence is only true if "you" refers to the individual and ignores societal costs and benefits.
In any case, "unreasonable search and seizure" is different from "avoid self-incrimination". If the police have a warrant to search you car (which generally removes your right to object to the search), are you of the opinion that you should be able to prevent the search on the basis that to do otherwise would constitute self-incrimination? Because that's... absurd. Basically, your whole argument is, at best, irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Hell, if at all possible, customize your resume for *every* job. A pure Windows shop is unlikely to care how much Linux knowledge I have, so I remove that and use the space to play up my skills in Win-specific areas and soft skills. A non-developer job (for example, security test) may care that I know how to program, but isn't going to be very interested in my knowledge of software development lifecycles and so forth. A job in a leadership role (even if nobody reports to you) requires different soft skills than one where you're part of a team, which in turn requires different skills from one where you work alone.
Customize everything. Don't lie, and do have a good, general-purpose resume that you can use for almost any scenario, but if you really want to get hired you should go the extra mile and at least tweak things for each job where you have the opportunity. Additionally, you definitely need to write cover letters wherever possible. Keep them short, professional, and on topic, and ensure they are as well edited as is practically possible - poor grammar can lead to a mark against you just by making you look sloppy or uneducated - but unless your writing is absolutely terrible, they are well worth the time it takes. You want to stand out from the crowd.
It's the scores that were being posted for students. He only found the way to leak everybody's scores because he was trying to get a friend's scores early, but was unable to do so. The data he got is the data that became available when the final scores were posted.
How is rounding grades to specific points (as opposed to a general curve, which is decidedly not present) anything other than tampering?
69 is a serious local maximum, but 67, 68, 70, and 71 are not given out at all. Similar for 83, and the values on either side of it.
There isn't a single result in the range of 55, 56, 57.
80 is a local minimum, among non-zero scores; 78 is a local maximum (79 got zero results). That makes no sense at all.
You can basically fit several lines to the peaks of the data:
35, 38, 40, 42 are all much higher than the tail of such a distribution should be. The shape of the actual tail is visible from 25-30 and 16-20.
50, 54, 58, 60, 66, 69, 78, 88 are all local maxima, and are mostly on a straight line (that just shouldn't happen, not over such a large range, and not including the global maximum).
83 is lower than it should be if the missing numbers on either side were assigned to it.
If you assume all the even scores from 88 to 94 were twice as high as they should be because the preceding number was added, then it almost aligns with the curve shown from 95-100. However, why then is 86 so much lower, and 84 missing entirely? That's an unlikely sharpness to a curve.
It's surprising because you know nothing about how this test works.
1. It's a standardized test, the correct answers are not subjective, and there are no re-takes allowed. Who the hell do you complain to about your 1-point-off score?
2. Ensuring a mean and a median are one thing, but these charts don't fit anything even close to a proper distribution. Even if you ignore the missing values, you end up with weird shit like 80 being far less common than 78 and 83 (the two nearest grades that are reported), or the fact that 78 is a local maximum higher than everything between it and 86, but the actual maximum is at 88.
3. Even a trivial degree of intelligent thought would have made it obvious that there aren't enough letter grades for even half of the 1-100 range. Leaving that (and the fact that the test doesn't use letter grades) aside though, there's a perfectly good proof right in the article that such schemes cannot possibly be the reason for the weird scores: you can get any score from 94-100 (though 94 is more than twice as common as 95, which is only a little more common than 96), but you can't get 93. There simply isn't any system where you can lose 0-6 points, or 8 points, or 10 points... but you can't lose 7 points, or 9 points. That just doesn't make sense.
Given your demonstrated lack of reading comprehension and reasoning power, I sure hope *you* have never been a teacher...
That would be believable, if it weren't for the fact that in some places you have pairs of unattainable values (55,56,57 is even a triplet) and in other places you have smooth lines that represent the expected distribution of values (95-100 I pretty reasonable-looking, as is 25-30). There's no way a spreading algorithm not specifically designed to produce bullshit of that nature would leave such a huge gap near the middle of the range, but have smooth regions at the top of the range and near the 27% mark (top and bottom both I might see, but not top and then merely low).
No. If you look at the top-6 stacked graph, it's pretty clearly indicated that a lot of people who should have gotten a 70 got a 69 instead, and perhaps 71 got promoted to 72. A fair stretching algorithm wouldn't produce those weird spikes and dips (even on the all-marks graph, why is 62 so much lower than everything else that even got a score within a range of +/- 5? Why is 72 so much higher than the scores on either side?).
Ascribing to malice, because you simply can't be this incompetent by accident...