That's the thing, courts have already stated that a hypothetical "could have been" does not in itself create reasonable doubt. Saying that aliens from Neptune planted the evidence against you will just get you laughed at. If all you have to refute the evidence is a hypothetical but unlikely scenario, you won't help yourself, and the court's decision will be based on the strength of the presented evidence (which I've already discussed enough here).
Sure, any criminal trial depends on how good the evidence is. I'm certainly not saying that all the prosecutor needs is evidence to show that it might have been you, but if the prosecutor has enough evidence to say that it most likely (beyond a reasonable doubt) was you, you can't just make up a hypothetical explanation against the evidence, you have to give a reasonable explanation. I've already had a lengthy discussion about what may or may not be considered sufficient evidence in this thread, so I won't repeat it here. I would say that the important conclusion from this discussion is that "sufficient evidence" is almost never a simple issue, and we aren't going to come up with any universal rules that the courts don't already have. A lot of this can get very complicated, and that's why courts are run by judges and not computers.
I'd say there's a difference between "can identify a person" and "does identify a person". I would say that yes, it can identify a person if the evidence is strong enough. Like I said, a single entry in a log could be faked pretty easily by some DDoS bot, but multiple entries, possibly in the logs from two or three different servers, that are consistent with the behavior of a human are probably enough to positively identify the customer account and, if you're the only person living there, you (the hypothetical claim that someone could have cracked into your wireless network has been shot down in court before). Of course I would disagree that an IP address necessarily does identify a person, since there are plenty of reasonable ways to refute such evidence, such as multiple people living in the home, friends frequently bringing over computers, or your own logs showing that other people have connected to your network. Again, as far as a court is concerned, your explanation has to be reasonable, not just theoretically possible.
Can I weasel out of it and say "sort of"? If you have enough good evidence, a court will probably agree that an IP address can identify a person. Quantity and quality is important, of course. A couple instances in a single server's log isn't much, but the same address in the logs of multiple servers at about the same time, where the logs (and perhaps other information from the server's database, such as message times) show a connection to usernames or an email address that's known to be yours might be enough. Of course, at that point, there's probably enough evidence for a search warrant that will be used to gather more and better evidence. The important point to remember is that evidence is usually not a binary situation. A court will consider the entire body of evidence, and no prosecutor in their right mind will pursue a case that relies on a single piece of evidence that isn't completely overwhelming.
The people involved in the original game (I notice how the summary doesn't credit the real original author) weren't too bad. I gave up when the crappy remake came out, which became much more popular because the characters had easy-to-abuse instant-kill abilities.
Of course it isn't absolute proof, but courts don't deal with absolute proof (like I said, only mathematicians do). It does qualify as evidence, though, with many other details of the situation determining how good the evidence is. A single instance of your IP address in a server log with a very poor chain of custody is definitely bad evidence, to the point of being basically useless. A court-granted warrant to monitor your communications could lead to several days' worth of activity that would be rather powerful evidence in court. And as I said before, a single piece of evidence is unlikely to get a conviction, but several pieces of evidence that support the same conclusion will probably be enough for a conviction no matter what hypothetical explanation you try to make up.
I think you're leaving out the beginning of the conversation, which I thought was implicit in my original post.
"Here's evidence that indicates that it was your computer."
"It wasn't mine."
My point is that you can't simply deny evidence (at least if you honestly expect to be found not guilty), you have to provide a reasonable alternative explanation for the evidence.
True enough. I was just pointing out that the response to "if it wasn't your computer, then whose was it" should be "(first) that's your job to find out, not mine, and (secondly) don't bother getting a subpoena to force me to tell you because I don't even know."
No, the prosecution has already done their job in determining that it was your computer (I'm assuming that they already have some supporting evidence and aren't just blindly accusing you). In order to refute that evidence, you have to show a reasonable alternative, and making up some theoretical method that some unknown person could have done it has been shot down by courts.
Without the physical evidence, being at the scene of the crime does not mean you committed the crime. So why do you think that activity from a certain IP address is enough to prove that an individual committed some act?
I think I see where you're having trouble. "Being at the scene of the crime" doesn't actually mean anything in a criminal trial without physical evidence supporting that statement. If there's no physical evidence that you were there (or maybe a whole lot of reliable witness testimony, probably depending on the crime and the sentence that the prosecution is going for), then as far as the court is concerned, you weren't there. This is why what you're saying about IP activity is incorrect; "being at the scene of the crime" is a conclusion that must be supported by physical evidence, while IP activity itself is evidence that your computer was used (i.e. you were "at the scene of the crime"). The quality of that evidence is important, of course, and it's probably difficult to get any conviction for any crime with any single piece of evidence, but if the quality and quantity of evidence is high enough and you can't provide a reasonable alternative explanation for the evidence, you are likely to be convicted.
No, the keyword is "prove" in "prove beyond a reasonable doubt". This means you need to prove something happened, not just show that it's the most likely situation. The burden of proof is on the prosecutor, not the defendant, to prove that something happened. Being in your house when a crime was committed does not prove that you committed that crime.
Uh, no. You're trying to use the word "prove" in the mathematical sense, but the only people that use that definition are mathematicians. The legal definition of "prove" is right there next to the word: beyond a reasonable doubt. You are correct that "most likely" isn't enough. 51% would be the most likely explanation, but it's far from reasonable doubt. Something in the 99% area would probably be far enough beyond reasonable doubt that you would be convicted.
If my wife and I are the only ones home and she gets murdered, there needs to be more evidence than "you were the only one there, so you must have done it" to prove that I was the one who murdered her.
You're leaving out a rather important step there, namely physical evidence that you were home at the time of the murder. If there's good physical evidence that you were present at the time of the murder, and there's no evidence at all that anyone else was there, the prosecution has a fairly good, though not excellent, case. Since you live there, finding evidence specific to the time of the murder may be difficult, especially if the murder weapon is an item from the house that you've handled frequently (making it easy to explain your fingerprints).
I'm not sure if that would be enough to provide reasonable doubt. If the evidence points to you, you can't just make up some theoretical way that someone else might have done it, you have to present a reasonable alternative explanation for the evidence. As for getting you out of responsibility because of negligence, it probably would be enough.
And what if your car was parked in front of a hydrant and there was a fire and six people died because the fire department couldn't get access to the hydrant quickly enough? I think you could be in pretty big trouble for that.
Unless your car is a tractor-trailer, I would expect them to just plow it out of the way and send you the bill.
If the person lives alone and only has one computer, it does effectively identify the person.
So I guess it's not possible for someone to come over and plug into my network. The only way it could identify one person would be if the person lived alone, has one computer, no family or friends, and never lets anyone into the house.
"If it wasn't your computer, then whose was it?"
"It was my friend Timmy's computer."
"Timmy, were you there that night?"
"No."
It would require a really stupid prosecutor and/or judge for the claim "my invisible friend did it" to work.
The first game I thought of is Secret of Mana, which is somewhat of a hybrid system. You gain levels by killing monsters, and those character levels increase your hit points, strength, etc. Your weapon and magic skills, though, gain levels through use; X kills with a sword or castings of a type of spell increases your weapon or magic skill level by 1, giving you more powerful attacks or making your spells more effective.
Heat is an electromagnetic phenomenon, so wouldn't that involve a released photon as well?
No, heat is a form of energy. Electromagnetic radiation is also a form of energy. You can convert energy from one form to the other, such as heating an object by shining light on it, or that same object radiating visible light when it gets hot enough, but they aren't the same phenomenon.
Refarctoring the code for a new platform? Uhh, if you are changing languages, you are throwing away your entire codebase. There is no refactoring.
In the specific case of translating from C# to Java, though, you might end up being surprised at how much of it can be copy/pasted, possibly with a few simple find/replace operations.
As much as I'd love to see legislators impeached and removed from office for writing and/or voting for some of the horrible laws, I can see where you'd run into problems with laws that aren't blatantly evil but still get struck down as being unconstitutional, especially when the legislators voting for it didn't think the law violated a constitution. You'd end up with legislators too scared to vote on anything (yeah, I know, that might not necessarily be a bad thing). It's kinda like the tenure rules for professors.
As far as constitutionality goes, a state law is basically the same as a federal law. A state law can be challenged and appealed up to the state's supreme court if it violates the state's constitution, or all the way to the United States Supreme Court if it violates the United States Constitution. I might be wrong on this part, but I think that if you challenge a state law based on a violation of the US Constitution, it would skip the state supreme court and go directly to the federal courts.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, well, it's UNH. What do you expect? (says the UMaine alumnus)
I kid, I kid
That's the thing, courts have already stated that a hypothetical "could have been" does not in itself create reasonable doubt. Saying that aliens from Neptune planted the evidence against you will just get you laughed at. If all you have to refute the evidence is a hypothetical but unlikely scenario, you won't help yourself, and the court's decision will be based on the strength of the presented evidence (which I've already discussed enough here).
Sure, any criminal trial depends on how good the evidence is. I'm certainly not saying that all the prosecutor needs is evidence to show that it might have been you, but if the prosecutor has enough evidence to say that it most likely (beyond a reasonable doubt) was you, you can't just make up a hypothetical explanation against the evidence, you have to give a reasonable explanation. I've already had a lengthy discussion about what may or may not be considered sufficient evidence in this thread, so I won't repeat it here. I would say that the important conclusion from this discussion is that "sufficient evidence" is almost never a simple issue, and we aren't going to come up with any universal rules that the courts don't already have. A lot of this can get very complicated, and that's why courts are run by judges and not computers.
I'd say there's a difference between "can identify a person" and "does identify a person". I would say that yes, it can identify a person if the evidence is strong enough. Like I said, a single entry in a log could be faked pretty easily by some DDoS bot, but multiple entries, possibly in the logs from two or three different servers, that are consistent with the behavior of a human are probably enough to positively identify the customer account and, if you're the only person living there, you (the hypothetical claim that someone could have cracked into your wireless network has been shot down in court before). Of course I would disagree that an IP address necessarily does identify a person, since there are plenty of reasonable ways to refute such evidence, such as multiple people living in the home, friends frequently bringing over computers, or your own logs showing that other people have connected to your network. Again, as far as a court is concerned, your explanation has to be reasonable, not just theoretically possible.
Can I weasel out of it and say "sort of"? If you have enough good evidence, a court will probably agree that an IP address can identify a person. Quantity and quality is important, of course. A couple instances in a single server's log isn't much, but the same address in the logs of multiple servers at about the same time, where the logs (and perhaps other information from the server's database, such as message times) show a connection to usernames or an email address that's known to be yours might be enough. Of course, at that point, there's probably enough evidence for a search warrant that will be used to gather more and better evidence. The important point to remember is that evidence is usually not a binary situation. A court will consider the entire body of evidence, and no prosecutor in their right mind will pursue a case that relies on a single piece of evidence that isn't completely overwhelming.
The people involved in the original game (I notice how the summary doesn't credit the real original author) weren't too bad. I gave up when the crappy remake came out, which became much more popular because the characters had easy-to-abuse instant-kill abilities.
Of course it isn't absolute proof, but courts don't deal with absolute proof (like I said, only mathematicians do). It does qualify as evidence, though, with many other details of the situation determining how good the evidence is. A single instance of your IP address in a server log with a very poor chain of custody is definitely bad evidence, to the point of being basically useless. A court-granted warrant to monitor your communications could lead to several days' worth of activity that would be rather powerful evidence in court. And as I said before, a single piece of evidence is unlikely to get a conviction, but several pieces of evidence that support the same conclusion will probably be enough for a conviction no matter what hypothetical explanation you try to make up.
I think you're leaving out the beginning of the conversation, which I thought was implicit in my original post.
"Here's evidence that indicates that it was your computer."
"It wasn't mine."
My point is that you can't simply deny evidence (at least if you honestly expect to be found not guilty), you have to provide a reasonable alternative explanation for the evidence.
True enough. I was just pointing out that the response to "if it wasn't your computer, then whose was it" should be "(first) that's your job to find out, not mine, and (secondly) don't bother getting a subpoena to force me to tell you because I don't even know."
No, the prosecution has already done their job in determining that it was your computer (I'm assuming that they already have some supporting evidence and aren't just blindly accusing you). In order to refute that evidence, you have to show a reasonable alternative, and making up some theoretical method that some unknown person could have done it has been shot down by courts.
Without the physical evidence, being at the scene of the crime does not mean you committed the crime. So why do you think that activity from a certain IP address is enough to prove that an individual committed some act?
I think I see where you're having trouble. "Being at the scene of the crime" doesn't actually mean anything in a criminal trial without physical evidence supporting that statement. If there's no physical evidence that you were there (or maybe a whole lot of reliable witness testimony, probably depending on the crime and the sentence that the prosecution is going for), then as far as the court is concerned, you weren't there. This is why what you're saying about IP activity is incorrect; "being at the scene of the crime" is a conclusion that must be supported by physical evidence, while IP activity itself is evidence that your computer was used (i.e. you were "at the scene of the crime"). The quality of that evidence is important, of course, and it's probably difficult to get any conviction for any crime with any single piece of evidence, but if the quality and quantity of evidence is high enough and you can't provide a reasonable alternative explanation for the evidence, you are likely to be convicted.
No, the keyword is "prove" in "prove beyond a reasonable doubt". This means you need to prove something happened, not just show that it's the most likely situation. The burden of proof is on the prosecutor, not the defendant, to prove that something happened. Being in your house when a crime was committed does not prove that you committed that crime.
Uh, no. You're trying to use the word "prove" in the mathematical sense, but the only people that use that definition are mathematicians. The legal definition of "prove" is right there next to the word: beyond a reasonable doubt. You are correct that "most likely" isn't enough. 51% would be the most likely explanation, but it's far from reasonable doubt. Something in the 99% area would probably be far enough beyond reasonable doubt that you would be convicted.
If my wife and I are the only ones home and she gets murdered, there needs to be more evidence than "you were the only one there, so you must have done it" to prove that I was the one who murdered her.
You're leaving out a rather important step there, namely physical evidence that you were home at the time of the murder. If there's good physical evidence that you were present at the time of the murder, and there's no evidence at all that anyone else was there, the prosecution has a fairly good, though not excellent, case. Since you live there, finding evidence specific to the time of the murder may be difficult, especially if the murder weapon is an item from the house that you've handled frequently (making it easy to explain your fingerprints).
I'm not sure if that would be enough to provide reasonable doubt. If the evidence points to you, you can't just make up some theoretical way that someone else might have done it, you have to present a reasonable alternative explanation for the evidence. As for getting you out of responsibility because of negligence, it probably would be enough.
And what if your car was parked in front of a hydrant and there was a fire and six people died because the fire department couldn't get access to the hydrant quickly enough? I think you could be in pretty big trouble for that.
Unless your car is a tractor-trailer, I would expect them to just plow it out of the way and send you the bill.
IPv6 addresses should be like MAC addresses for people. Issued at birth, and tattooed onto your ass.
But if that address opens some kind of time portal...
So I guess it's not possible for someone to come over and plug into my network. The only way it could identify one person would be if the person lived alone, has one computer, no family or friends, and never lets anyone into the house.
"If it wasn't your computer, then whose was it?"
"It was my friend Timmy's computer."
"Timmy, were you there that night?"
"No."
It would require a really stupid prosecutor and/or judge for the claim "my invisible friend did it" to work.
The first game I thought of is Secret of Mana, which is somewhat of a hybrid system. You gain levels by killing monsters, and those character levels increase your hit points, strength, etc. Your weapon and magic skills, though, gain levels through use; X kills with a sword or castings of a type of spell increases your weapon or magic skill level by 1, giving you more powerful attacks or making your spells more effective.
Heat is an electromagnetic phenomenon, so wouldn't that involve a released photon as well?
No, heat is a form of energy. Electromagnetic radiation is also a form of energy. You can convert energy from one form to the other, such as heating an object by shining light on it, or that same object radiating visible light when it gets hot enough, but they aren't the same phenomenon.
It still has what one slashdot poster called 'the stench of microsoft' on it.
Yeah, but nobody pays attention to twitter and his sockpuppets anymore.
Refarctoring the code for a new platform? Uhh, if you are changing languages, you are throwing away your entire codebase. There is no refactoring.
In the specific case of translating from C# to Java, though, you might end up being surprised at how much of it can be copy/pasted, possibly with a few simple find/replace operations.
As much as I'd love to see legislators impeached and removed from office for writing and/or voting for some of the horrible laws, I can see where you'd run into problems with laws that aren't blatantly evil but still get struck down as being unconstitutional, especially when the legislators voting for it didn't think the law violated a constitution. You'd end up with legislators too scared to vote on anything (yeah, I know, that might not necessarily be a bad thing). It's kinda like the tenure rules for professors.
Don't get me started about the Gelatinous Cubes.
But there's always room for Jello!
Man, I wish I could find that cartoon. I've tried asking Google, but I haven't found it yet.
That video games are a pretty bad place to gain wisdom from?
Are you kidding? Just the other day, I found a magical hat that gave a +5 bonus to Wisdom.
If you trick your chef... this will come back to you.
And if you don't have a good bonus for saving throws against poison, you're in real trouble.
As far as constitutionality goes, a state law is basically the same as a federal law. A state law can be challenged and appealed up to the state's supreme court if it violates the state's constitution, or all the way to the United States Supreme Court if it violates the United States Constitution. I might be wrong on this part, but I think that if you challenge a state law based on a violation of the US Constitution, it would skip the state supreme court and go directly to the federal courts.
It's the internet -- the cat never goes back in the bag.
Are you sure? There must be dozens of counterexamples on Lolcats.