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Comment This happened to me... (Score 3, Interesting) 209

... not as defendant, but as a juror.

I served on a jury last summer for a case of armed home invasion. The victim, if you can call him that, was a multiply-convicted white crack user. The victim claimed the defendant forced his way into the defendant's house with a gun, as part of a dispute over the defendant's missing cell phone following a drug deal.

The defense attorney's goal was to convince us that there was no way to determine beyond a reasonable doubt whether the defendant committed the crime, or his brother. The police did a horribly sloppy job of gathering evidence, the DNA was so contaminated that while it matched the victim, it also had good odds of matching the defendant's brother or about 1 in 5 random people off the street. The victim lied on the stand several times and showed no reliability as an eyewitness, and all the other evidence (phone calls, evidence collected at defendant's house) pointed to *some* member of the defendant's family, but no way to know who.

So we found him not guilty. Kind of a shame since the defendant probably *was* a drug dealer, but no way to prove it wasn't his brother. And the kicker: if they bring the brother to trial, he can use the same defense.

Comment Re:Um, this is easy (Score 5, Insightful) 209

Who says it was either of them? DNA fingerprints are not unique. There are likely to be 50 other people in the UK with the same DNA fingerprint as the twins and it's entirely possible that one of them was the robber. The depressing thing is that the police seem to think that this is enough evidence to convict even if there is no other evidence, unless they happen to randomly find two people with the same DNA fingerprint.

Comment Re:I'm surprised nobody has said this yet, but.. (Score 1) 622

Because they might have? There are over 11 million Mormons. You can't expect all of them to act the same. Every group, not just the religious, is going to have its crazy people.

I was baptized a Mormon when I was 13 but I'm now agnostic. I still have a bunch of friends that I met through my church. I still talk and hang out with them on a regular basis. I haven't gone to church in over 6 years now.

Comment Re:A Billing System Deficiency (Score 1) 305

Cingular bought AT&T Wireless and then AT&T bought Cingular. It is in fact AT&T. Other than that minor correction your post has a lot of merit.

I have Sprint for my mobile phone provider and I have had a lot of good experiences with them. I know for a while they had it where if you went over your minutes it would just bump you up into the next plan. You could choose to pay the overage if you wanted to but it was a lot cheaper just to pay the difference for the higher plan.

PS - Alltel recently got purchased by Verizon. My condolences.

Comment Re:Competing with itself?! (Score 1) 299

CCP's recent support for EVE Online in Linux is now set to be discontinued this March. Released last November along with the Mac OS X client, it has failed to share the expected continual growth as seen with Mac client.

You have to read it in context with the first sentence. The sentence says that CCP is discontinuing support for the Linux client because it isn't doing as well as the Mac client. The sentence doesn't say they will be discontinuing the Mac client.

Comment Re:Wrong Premise (Score 1) 1108

Maybe so, but here's a hypothetical situation to consider. A comet is crashing towards the area you live in. Scientists have a raging debate as to whether or not it will completely disintegrate before hitting your house. Do you stay in your house till they reach a "consensus" or get the hell out of there?

Whether global warming is true or not really doesn't matter much. We still need to take precautions to prevent pollution and switch to cleaner energy sources. It will benefit our own health and safety as well as be a matter of prudence.


So what you are saying is we should leave Earth?

On a more serious note though, we shouldn't be mucking with the Earth's climate until we understand what we are actually doing. Now do I agree we should switch to cleaner energy sources? Yes I do but not for the sake of Global Warming. We should do it so the air we breath is cleaner, whether or not the Earth's climate is changing is completely irrelevant.

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