Cops arrest people who are released without charges all the time. No cop witnesses a crime, and then calls the DA to ask permission to make an arrest. The cop witnesses the crime, makes the arrest, makes his report, and then the DA has to decide whether to press charges or not.

Seems like GPG could defeat this pretty easily by putting in some random HLTs.

If they want to serve the public, they can start by opposing our government. Being hired muscle for the aristocracy doesn't help anyone but the aristocracy. All the property crime in the country doesn't add up to even a percent of the fraud committed by banks. All the violent crime in the country doesn't add up to the lives that could be saved by throwing a wrench in the military industrial complex, or the agriculture industry, or the insurance industry.

No "good person" can support this government in any respect. The "actual bad guys" are the ones in Congress and corporate board rooms throughout the country. Find me a cop who is willing to arrest James Clapper, and I'll show you a good cop. The rest of them are "good Germans" at best.

Plea bargaining in the sense you see on TV - "plead guity to the jaywalking or we seek the death penalty" - is, to my mind, coercion. I don't know to what extent that exists in reality, however.

In reality, fewer than 10% of criminal cases go to trial. Fewer than 2% of federal criminal cases go to trial. Mandatory minimum sentences run in the multiple decades, making a bid for a trial an extremely risky proposition. This is extortion, plain and simple.

It's in nobody's interest to spend public money trying someone who is willing to plead guilty

Only if you assume that he is actually guilty, and not an innocent person assuming that he's going to be railroaded at trial, and taking the only chance he sees to minimize the damage.

that has to be balanced against the very large cost and time savings.

If it's not worth paying for a trial, it's not worth prosecuting at all. If you can't afford to offer your citizens trials, the solution isn't to shovel people into prisons until you have the largest prison population in the world(which we do, and it's not saving us any money either). The solution is to reexamine your laws, figure out the ones that are worth having, and which ones you can't afford.

A real justice system doesn't cost us money, it saves us money. e.g. if we stopped prosecuting murders, chaos would ensue, and we would stop having a functioning economy. That would cost us a lot more than it would to prosecute murders. If we stopped prosecuting drunken driving, carnage on the highways would discourage people from using it, damaging our economy. Again that would cost us more than DUI enforcement. And that's just considering economic damage, and not the human costs.

So all this talk about cost saving is quite frankly bullshit. If the laws you are enforcing aren't paying for themselves, directly or indirectly, it's a bad law. Trying to save money on top of the inherent payoff of justice by denying us our rights is incredibly wrongheaded.

As I explained before, the aim of these policies is not to try to secure convictions that otherwise would not be obtained

Bullshit. The aim of these policies is to pad prosecutor conviction rates so they can appear "tough on crime". No prosecutor ever got reappointed, or reelected, because he released innocent people.

The aim is to avoid the expense of a lengthy trial.

By depriving citizens of their rights. Sorry, civilization is expensive. It's worth the cost!

it's a systemic policy, and the system wants to avoid trials.

This much I agree with you on. The system wants to deprive us of our right to a trial.

that makes sense in terms of 'rewarding' people for saving as much time and expense on the part of the justice system as possible

No, this is no reward. This is punishment for exercising your right to a trial. It doesn't save time and expense at all. What it really does is fills our prisons to capacity, including a large number of innocent people who were extorted out of their right to a trial. Plea bargaining is barbaric.

it's not abuse. It's following the law.

As if they were mutually exclusive?

Cellulose is the only way to go. One of the most promising sources is switch grass, which can be grown on much more marginal land, and pretty much re-plants itself (due to deep roots).

Indeed. Notice how little corn is grown in Coburn's home state of Oklahoma. Oklahoma's top crops are winter wheat and hay, switchgrass would fit right in there.

if you want to contract out police work

We don't want to contract out police work. Ever. Why even bother having a government if you're going to contract out its essential functions?

The profit motive should never come anywhere near law enforcement. The moment anyone in government starts thinking of profit instead of public service is the moment tyranny begins. The only thing that should guide a police department is how they can best serve their community, not how they can best increase their budget.

I quit once I ascended. Well, I started another game and got my ascension kit together, and decided I had had enough.

Does TOME have an ASCII interface for those inclined? Can you play it entirely without moving your hands from home row?

Losing weight and having good cardiovascular health are two entirely different things.

Freitas suggested the use of DRM techniques as a way of preventing the malicious use of nanotechnology. Seems like a "good" application to me.

Me too. That sounds like a well intentioned application that would be wonderful to realize. The problem is that in the real world, DRM of any sort only restricts legitimate users. This has been true with every instance of DRM anywhere in the world, ever. Would you trust DRM to protect us against nanobots with that track record?

Of course not. So his point stands, DRM is bad.

Driving is not a constitutionally protected right.

Sophistry. Freedom of movement is a constitutionally protected right. Saying that freedom of movement doesn't apply when you use a car is like saying that freedom of speech doesn't apply when you use a computer.

If you don't like the terms, you are free to not accept them but then you also may not use the state's roads.

Forcing someone to abandon their 4th amendment rights to use a car makes about as much sense as forcing someone to abandon their 4th amendment rights in order to use the mail. After all, isn't mail a privilege too?

Forgive us for assuming that you meant they would be corrected in some meaningful manner. I can sit here all day and "correct" the SCOTUS for making a terrible decision in Wickard v Filburn(1942). It doesn't make a damned bit of difference. Nobody cares what I say, and nobody is going to care what you or any other armchair justice says when the SCOTUS rubberstamps NSA surveillance. The only correction that matters is one that has actual policy implications.

the Supreme Court is no more "immune" from politics than any other branch of the Federal government

All three branches are immune from politics, when it comes to national security issues. There's a reason why blatantly illegal practices have near unanimous support amongst our representatives, and it's not because our government is a functioning democracy.