I assume that the agent's theories were developed to support some set of facts that he had at hand and that those facts can still be pointed to in support of the previous theory. I've not studied this case in any detail, but I know that the goal of any prosecutor is to get a conviction, sometimes more so than being sure they have the right guilty party on trial. While in the ideal world, justice and truth might converge, in our world justice is on a clock and the truth is not.

I don't think the soundness of the theory is so important to the jury as is the fact that the agent was sure this other guy was the DPR, and now the agent is sure the defendant is the DPR - the agent has to admit to being wrong before and can be asked why in 6 months he would not have a new theory about who really is the DPR. I think it leaves a lot of doubt about the certainty the agent ought to feel about his theory.

And even if it were to eventually... it certainly isn't right now. Your privacy has been invaded for weeks or months. That is a fait accompli; no market reaction can undo that.

That's the thing I find baffling about the libertarian fantasists. Even if in some kind of long-term it were to eliminate some kind of abuse, it can't reverse the effects of that abuse. Pollutants stay in the environment. People injured by dangerous products remain injured. Patients who die from counterfeit medicines stay dead. You can't sue your way whole.

There are many other reasons why the market isn't nearly as frictionless as libertarian theorists like to imagine. But right here, in this case, we've got an example: you will never regain the privacy that you lost because of this. Even if you switch providers, and that forces them to change the policy, it won't return the privacy you've already lost. Markets simply aren't frictionless, and that friction makes the notion that "the market fixes everything" just plain false.

That's not to say we need infinite regulations on everything. The right level of regulation is difficult and complex, and has to be worked out as a compromise. I'm just pointing out that "oh, it'll all be OK, we never need to do anything at all" isn't a helpful contribution to that compromise.

I thought the idea of Uber wasn't to be cheaper, but more convenient. They have more drivers out working than the taxis, since it's a part-time job rather than a full-time job, and can attract drivers at surge times with higher fees.

According to http://www.businessinsider.com..., a taxi is actually cheaper than Uber in New York, and about even after tipping. But the real win is not having to hail a cab or deal with the unreliable dispatching service. They use GPS more effectively to provide better feedback. They're also a single service, rather than dozens of cab companies.

I suspect that the cabs could provide much better service by incorporating part of Uber's business model. It's a bit disturbing to me that they seem to want to win based primarily on requiring a regulation limiting the number of cars. Not that Uber is playing nicely, at least not from what I read on teh intarwebz, and if so I'd be happy to see them beaten out by somebody who will be less predatory.

And yet people go out of their way to mine them. That's why I find bitcoins so distasteful. If they were nothing more than an algorithm for cryptographically-encrypted checking accounts, denominated in the same currency I'd always been using, I'd be all for it.

Instead, it not only creates its own currency, but proceeds to hand it out for (effectively) free to early adopters, and others for the value of devoting computers and electricity to it. The fans generally have a personal interest in it, not just to improve the transfer of value but to bolster the currency they invented for the purpose. They're seeking the currency for its own value, not entirely dissimilar to hoarding it, and inventing that value in the process.

Like I said, if somebody were to craft their own blockchain and use it solely as a transfer medium, that would indeed be extremely useful. Our current transfer system is abominable. There are probably even ways to use it as a single-currency to reduce international fees. But the idea of having them sell it to me, having put in no significant work for the value they've supposedly created, is of no interest to me.

Oddly, some people don't seem to want their representatives to be smarter than they are. They want their representatives to be approachable and more like them. I also see a lot of people (including in this thread) campaigning for direct democracy.

Representation is partly about removing the day-to-day swing of the masses; the US legislature is deliberately divided between a house that is replaced very frequently and one that is more aloof. But I think it's also about the pragmatic effect of composing legislation. Legislation is never really binary; it's full of compromises and details. It would be difficult to assemble a majority coalition around any one bill rather than thousands of variants.

At the very least, that means you end up with parties. And it's difficult to conceive of how you'd do the negotiations with a full country-sized electorate. There are ways to do it; ballot propositions are really laws done by a direct majority. But it often turns out badly, and few really understand what they're voting on.

Actually, there are German and Japanese variants. (The German one is a translation of UnNetHack, done I think by the same guy who did the English version of that variant. The Japanese one, somewhat older, is called NetHack Brass and seems to be mainly a flavor variant, i.e., it changes much more than just language.)

Actually, that could happen, if you've eaten a purple F, for example. (Admittedly, the fact that "gnome" and "gargoyle" both start with g would be an irrelevant coincidence in such a case.)

Five bytes. In decimal, it'd be 38 115 104 121 59. HTH.HAND.

Honestly, it'd probably taste better than some of the other stuff NetHack characters eat.

For practical purposes, you can think of libuncursed as the display layer of NetHack 4, replacing an older curses library that NitroHack used, which in turn replaced the extensive and rather complicated set of platform-specific user interfaces NetHack 3.4.3 used, which were never entirely consistent with one another, due to being separately maintained.

libnethack is distributed with the game, as part of it, and I think it is even linked in statically by default. Yes, it was written as a highly-generalized support library, so that it *could* be used by other projects if desired and could probably even be made a dynamic library. But if all you want to do is build and run NetHack 4, that doesn't matter.

But in any case the original question from the Dev Team is about what to do in the vanilla codebase that may eventually lead to a new vanilla release (with a number yet to be announced, but 3.6 is probable; the number 3.5 will not be used for reasons explained on nethack.org). The vanilla codebase does not use libuncursed and in a number of additional ways is far more similar to 3.4.3 than it is to NetHack 4.

Although, the NetHack 4 devs are probably following this thread as well and may also implement Unicode in a larger way. (Unicode graphics for map display are already supported there, but things like player names, fruit names, object names, and level annotations are still treated as ASCII, I think, the same as in 3.4.3.)

Another thing not mentioned in the post is that the Dev Team is known to have already implemented some Unicode support, using wchar_t, which you can find in the leaked code (a tarball made from the tip of the dev team's internal repository from a few months ago now), if you hunt down a copy of that. But apparently they have not entirely settled on that implementation as the final solution.

Ya know, I'm not so sure about that. The whole premise of democracy is that we are, collectively, smarter than any of us individually. Somehow, the average of the guesses comes out as closer to the truth than any of the guesses. Uninformed voters on one side of the issue cancel out uninformed voters on the other side of the issue.

There's a lot of reason to be dubious about that, but to be frank, the vast majority of voters are very uninformed about practically every issue. Any significant topic requires years or decades of study to be really expert on. And most voters will go in with nothing more than they've read in the newspaper, or worse, on TV. Take any topic you actually know in detail; do you think that any reporter has ever understood it? Here on Slashdot we regularly complain about how science and technology are misrepresented and misunderstood. Do you really think that reporting on energy issues, the economy, or foreign affairs is any better?

I'm always glad for people to want to know more, but practically everybody goes into the voting booth with a massive case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, convinced that they know the topic far better than they actually do. The whole point of democracy is to try to take that into account. Usually, we're actually voting for people to represent us, and they often know it a bit better than we do (or at least, they have advisers who do), but in the end we're really just hoping that the representative on the side of the truth will have slightly more followers than the representative who has it wrong. Democracy is designed to expose a slight bias towards reality, even if few of the individuals involved can actually justify that bias.

I'd love to live in a meritocracy where only the best experts are making decisions... but who's going to pick those experts? I'd be happy if it were me, but I bet you wouldn't be. Democracy is the closest thing I've ever seen to a fair way to pick. And if so, it only works because everybody gets to take their best guess. I suspect that the ones who know enough to know that they don't know very much are better qualified to take their guess than those who don't even know that they don't know.

Especially when you've got a news media which gets its best viewership by telling them how smart they are and that all of the smart people agree with them. They're the most dangerous voters of them all, and they vote in droves. And I can't think of any fair way to keep them out of the polls. So everybody might as well go out and vote.

Get ready for the big one. If we have an earthquake because of this, it could measure, 3.0, 3.5, maybe even 4.0 on the moment magnitude scale. People up to several miles away from the epicenter might be able to *feel* the quake, if they are sitting quietly in unpadded chairs at the time and concentrating on paying attention to tiny vibrations.

(I exaggerate. Slightly. I believe we actually had a 6.something once, back in the eighties, and people up to eighty or ninety miles from the epicenter claimed afterward that they felt it.)

Ohio is only seismically active in the technical sense. You generally need an actual seismograph to detect said activity. I'm sure it's fascinating, but it has little practical significance.

Obama, by himself, can't do anything legislatively. As I explained above, the Democrats couldn't do anything by themselves except during a brief period in 2009, during which time they managed to produce one epoch-making piece of legislation.

It's true that Democrats don't work well together, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The Democratic party represents a number of different points of view. The health care bill that we did get is driven by the fact that a number of Democrats are genuinely uncomfortable with single-payer legislation. You can call that "in the pockets of big business" but they were genuinely reflecting their constituents desires (as demonstrated by the fact that most of them got creamed anyway by accusations of "soshulizm" in the next election). The Democrats' big-tent mentality is what wins them the Presidency; Republican insistence on ideology is keeping them from scoring a national majority.

The Republicans have been seen as highly effective, but only in banding together as the "party of no". You're going to see them produce little to no real legislation over the next two years, unless they radically change. The few positive ideas they have are not broadly acceptable (lowering taxes on the wealthy, eliminating social safety nets). You'll notice that they haven't been touting any alternative to the ACA, and if they try to repeal without replacing they'll find that a lot of people like actual provisions of the act. (The one they don't like is the one that pays for it, and I'd be tickled to see them eliminate *just* the coverage requirement, which would be hilarious.)

Now the Democrats get to spend two years filibustering everything the Republicans try to do (primarily eliminating environmental and safety regulations) and look more or less unified in the process. They still won't look unified, because they've got more than enough votes for the filibuster, which means that some Senators who imagine their seats are vulnerable will cross lines, but they'll be there when they need to be. And that's as the Democrats come into what should be a strong 2016, as they take back some seats that they shouldn't have lost in the 2010 wave election (just as the Republicans last year took back some seats they shouldn't have lost in 2008).

Which returns us to a Democratic Senate, probably a Democratic President, and probably a Republican House come 2017. At which point the Democrats will again fail to push a liberal agenda because they're not really a liberal party, and haven't been for a very long time. They're the party of everybody driven away by the batshit right-wing agenda of the Republicans.