I was going for "you can't, you can only show it's safe under a large range of likely circumstances—unless you can trick people into thinking you've 'proven' something by lying to them." Nice guess, though? I guess?

Regulatory capture and biased media coverage, mostly.

Well, it depends. Obviously running cable through a conduit is somewhat more labour-intensive than pulling it out, especially if the conduit isn't vertical. In this case I'm not sure it was all that inaccessible, though, given that the thieves went through a manhole cover; surely that suggests at least a reasonable passage to crawl through.

I can! It makes it completely. Completely of the hilarious.

No, we've disowned him now. You or one of your friends may be able to guess why!

The bill actually does touch on the style of patent litigation used by big tech companies:

(detail)

See exhibits (a), (b).

That, and, Omidyar feels that many of the participants in the PayPal DDoS saw it as a form of protest. He doesn't attribute malice to them.

At the time the story was fresh, it seemed likely that even if she were deemed competent, the punishment wouldn't be all that severe, very much because she wasn't likely to harm anyone else, yes. (As long as she doesn't have another roommate, anyway.)

I believe the (healthy) rationale behind the prosecution of cases where another attempt is unlikely or impossible (say the target died) is that the perpetrator has been shown to be unbalanced enough to attempt to redress one problem with murder and could potentially try to solve other problems the same way.

That being said, there aren't too many criminal justice systems that completely extricate themselves from being vengeful instruments of state violence.

It's very important legislation that protects the snack food industry from over-expansion.

As a general rule, to prevent further attempts. That counts as preventing harm!

(Although note my other post, which expands the definition to include redressal as well.)

There was a story a few years ago of an elderly lady with dementia who strangled another nursing home resident. Despite being an actual murder, it wasn't clear whether or not she'd actually be sentenced to any punishments.

I was taking the stance that harmful (either to the animal or the human) sexual contact could occur, and because of that we need some kind of law to regulate it. Not an outright ban, just limitations. If, for example, we declare gorillas people (as this lawsuit aims to do) they'd need to be taught not to act like an alpha silverback does in the wild; conversely, you'd still want regulations against penetrative sex with smaller animals likely to be harmed as that would constitute a clear-cut case of animal abuse.

Okay, fair. Prevent and redress harm.

De minimis non curat lex. Laws were invented to prevent harm, not categories of behaviour. Your point is fundamentally misguided.

The core issue I was trying to highlight is that the summary says "in all countries," which is misleading. It might be better to say "in a little over half of the countries" or even "in the majority of countries." The PISA 2012 results document uses the wording "many countries and economies" to describe the situation—never "all."

However, there's another problem with the summary sentence I quoted. The PISA 2012 results has this to say about reading:

So the other part of that same sentence from TFS, "boys generally perform a bit better than girls, but this applies only to math," is extremely misleading due to its incompleteness, in addition to being horribly structured. (I trust you understand why this is a problem for journalistic honesty.)