I'm not sure I understand your scenario, but if it's about a suspect turning a "crown witness", we don't have that either. I.e. there are no "prisoners dilemma" type situations. If you want to bear witness against your co-conspirators that probably won't hurt you when it comes to the sentencing phase, quite the contrary, but it's for the court to decide. The prosecutor can't promise to not prosecute. That promise has no legal standing. If you're stupid enough to implicate yourself on the stand, then there are no "get out of jail" cards.

Now, of course, in cases like the Aaron Schwarz case, that wasn't the issue, there were no other potential defendants, and AFAIK those situations are more uncommon in the US. Most cases involve a single defendant plea bargaining. How to address that in a situation with multiple defendants in the US if you want to keep the possibility of "crown witness" is a good question that I haven't put much thought into. If you have an adversarial process couldn't you just address that through the defence and courts i.e. "Your honor, it is quite clear to the defence that this witness is in fact guilty of taking part in this crime and he should be charged accordingly", i.e. make the promise the prosecutor makes to not prosecute null and void?Shouldn't that also make such testimony more reliable, as the potential pay off is no longer a "get out of jail free" card, but the possibility of a more modest reduction of your sentence?

You could argue that that would lead to fewer convictions, but then again, so will any change that takes power away from the prosecution and transfers it to the defendant. If we're more interested in justice than efficiency, then of course we'll successfully prosecute less people, I don't see a way around that.

But in the current US system you get confessions in about 10% of the cases where we know that people were actually innocent (the innocence project tracks this).

We don't have plea bargains in Sweden and on balance I can't say I look forward to having them. If they were ever introduced I think they should be capped at (say) max 10% or 15% or some such. I.e. none of that "I'm seeking 99 years in prison, but I'll settle for six months" as is currently not uncommon with US prosecutors. By stopping the prosecutor from lowering the sought penalty more than a reasonable percentage, you could balance the system to where it would be both worth to cooperate, but also not possible for the prosecutor to extort the defendant by skewing the risk/reward calculation to the extent that is common today.

P.S. And of course, in Sweden, if the state prosecutes you, they pay for your defence (i.e. the lawyer of your choice, reimbursed at a proper rate), and prosecutors are appointed, not elected. Last place I want a bloody politician...

Yes, I'm not saying that RAID has no place. I use software based mirroring for my "big" drive that has stuff that's annoying to lose, but not critical. And then "offsite" (well in my basement...) backup for the stuff that has to be there in addition to mirroring.

But making a list of the filenames, that's a novel idea that sounds about right. Have to do that. (And remember to include it in the offsite backup. :-) )

But it doesn't allow you to recover data in the much more common event that someone mistakenly erased it. As you'll restore about nine files due to mistakes for about every one you'll restore due to disks failing, that's what backup is supposed to protect you from.

Also, RAID ignores two other major failure modes, and that's faulty hardware/bus, and filesystem software bugs that hurts/destroys your entire filesystem. RAID won't help you from that either. In fact, since such bugs are relatively more common in professional RAID controllers, you're slightly more at risk from those when you run RAID, than without. (As any pro and they'll tell you a story about when the entire RAID-array failed horribly.)

So, no. While RAID can be an important part of any availability strategy, it's not "backup" for any useful definition of that word.

Oh, it was tried long before that. ABB tried similar technology in the 2000 time frame.

While it sounded great in theory it didn't bear out in practical tests and the technology was shelved.

P.S. No-one in a commercial setting tests developed technology for 5-10 years any more. That kind of money down the drain for no return on investment hasn't been generally available in industry for several decades (and when it was, it was mostly the defence industry that could afford such extravagances).

Sure it won't be quite the unanimity it was before, but the few dissenters won't prevent it from being renewed again. Only one Republican voted for this bill, most of them were loudly against weakening the PATRIOT Act in any way; come renewal time they'll extend it for another five years happily.

Why would you assume that it will go any differently in 2015 than it did in 2005, 2006 and 2011? The Republicans came out against this bill with accusations that it would help ISIS and risk another 9/11, and when the time for renewal is up in May (not January as I said), they will be in control of both houses and looking towards the primaries and the election after that - they're not going to let it expire

I don't see any chance that it won't be renewed. I'm sure there will be lots of drama, name-calling and stirring speeches, but in the end, little or no substantive changes to the act itself, and it will be 2020 before all this comes up again.

It extended 3 out of 100 provisions of the PATRIOT Act until 2017. And actually, the vote was to put it up for discussion and amendment, so it could have been possible to get rid of that.

Now the entire act will be renewed in January, all 100 provisions. Not a win.

And to be fair to the movie the fucked up 3d UI was actually a graphics demo made by SGI for IRIX. So it wasn't the usual Hollywood idea of how computers worked, but rather an engineers view of how computers could work. (Inspired by Hollywood not doubt). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn)

Wasn't that rather old hat by the time the F1 circus got to it?

Yes, since Vestas only makes wind turbines, they're the largest in the world by market share delivering wind turbines. (Your own reference puts them at no 1 in 2013...)

Now, that other smaller companies have started developing gearbox less turbines is interesting, whether they'll be successful we'll see. They're more expensive up front, and of course their promise of lower life cycle cost haven't been demonstrated yet (as there aren't any). Scaling since they depend on rare earth metals is also in question.

So, in summary. There aren't any yet, but we'll see what happens.

Ah, whole paragraph fell out: Should have been: You'd be surprised about the result. In the research that has been done, lethality when comparing handguns and knifes rely only on the proximity to the attacker. You see hand guns are very difficult to shoot accurately at range when under stress (which is demonstrated by the abysmal performance of US police officers, and that's taking into account that the average engagement range is only seven yards). So running away from an attacker works about equally well when running from either a knife or a gun. If you get only a few yards away, you're about equally at risk from either a knife or a (hand gun). You see, even though Hollywood does its best to make you think that guns are really dangerous and knifes aren't, in reality at the ranges where both are effective a knife and a gun is about equally deadly.

You'd be surprised about the result. In the research that has been done, lethality when comparing handguns and knifes rely only on the proximity to the a

So, in the average case, running helps about equally well against either attacker. Funny how that works out.

Now, however, it wouldn't matter, because you wouldn't use the knife/axe etc. as your primary weapon anyway. China has some very strict gun laws and they still have mass killings. It's just that the attacker takes a galon (or so) of gasoline on a bus and sets fire to the whole thing (including himself). That has killed more than thirty people at a time on at least three separate occasions in the last years.

So, the knife/axe/club is only there to prevent you from being successfully rushed (much like the claymore in the army). It's there to make sure you have the opportunity to bring your main weapon to bear (flammable liquid would probably work very well for this).

So, until you bring your society in order, these things will continue to happen, gun control or no gun control (something which is much too late anyway, as there are simply too many guns to easily do away with, with a reasonable effort).

Remember, the statistics clearly show that: "Guns don't kill people. Americans with guns kill people."

Which ones are those? The biggest and most modern to date certainly has a gearbox: http://cleantechnica.com/2012/...

As a gearbox is something you'd really like to get rid of, and since Vestas is the largest manufacturer in the world, you'd think they'd know what they were doing.