Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) would like to speak with you about how your health can enjoy the benefits of herbal supplements!

Unless there is dope residue in the car, there is no way that any prosecutor would ever charge this because there is no way they could prove the intent element.

Because the opportunity cost for the prosecutor to file charges is so high, and innocent people never plea-bargain to avoid the threat of trumped-up charges that could put them in jail for the rest of their life if the trial goes badly because their overworked public defender is unable to mount a successful defense.

Prosecutors will happily charge anything that they think will work as leverage for a plea-bargain. That's their job, that's how the system works, and that's how all of the incentives are set up.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

No, legal fees are not 'taken care of if you win'. The system doesn't care if you are innocent, the system cares about the system, and obviously anyone who ends up in court has to be a scumbag, right?

  For criminal defense cases, you may choose to be represented without charge by an overworked, underfunded public defender who has every interest in resolving your case as quickly as possible via plea-bargaining... regardless of guilt or innocence.

Or you may hire an attorney who is actually being paid to represent your interests, where the cheapest option available is typically in excess of a thousand dollars, substantially more for serious charges or if the case actually goes to a jury trial.

The vast majority of defendants in the American legal system do not have the financial resources to hire an attorney, which is why the vast majority of all criminal charges are settled by plea bargain. Prosecutors have every incentive to pile on the threat of every imaginable charge and use the uncertainty of the outcome of a trial as leverage to coerce a plea bargain, guilty or not, because it works, and because they are almost never held responsible for their unethical conduct even when they commit egregious acts like concealing evidence that would exonerate the accused.

Add in unconscionable levels of police malfeasance and corruption on nearly every level, and the result is a criminal justice system that is anything but just. Unless you've got plenty of money. Which is kind of the point.

The per-capita homicide rate in NYC is actually lower than in any other major city in the USA, barely above the national average.

Chicago roughly comparable to Atlanta... and even Detroit is still safer than New Orleans. You can argue the reasons, but you can't argue that the deep south has more than its share of social problems.

Human drivers are bad at following safely because their reaction times are:

- Subjectively difficult to estimate accurately.
- Wildly variant from moment to moment dependent on the situation.

People are bad at realizing how fast they can respond. People are easily distracted, and are not capable of continuous full attention to more than a small fraction of their visual field even under ideal conditions. If you're looking at the radio to change the station, you are not physically capable of perceiving many changes in the peripheral view you have of the road, no matter how your brain fools you into thinking "Oh, I can still see everything", when your actual reaction time has just jumped by an order of magnitude.

Robotic reaction times are easy to measure objectively, and are situationally invariant. The the only relevant factors in following distance are the expected stopping distance at speed in the current conditions, and avoiding situations where the vehicle could potentially be unable to avoid a collision if whatever it is following stopped at maximum decelleration. This is EASY compared to most of the problems involved in navigating an unpredictable and changeable landscape.

I'd be much happier with a robot car following me than any human driver, the Stig included. It doesn't take a lot of distance to be safe with 50ms reaction time and rangefinders that are capable of discerning relative acceleration on a millisecond basis to form decisions with.

Which one actually leads to a safer world?

That would depend on the legitimacy, fairness, and effectiveness of the court system.

A reasonable argument can be made that all of the above are currently on the decline in America. How you choose to apportion the blame between wealth inequality, the systematic dismantling of public services, the prison-industrial complex, decline of the family, a crisis of faith, or other causes... is up to you.

I certainly don't trust our justice system to operate within acceptable standards. Do you?

This vote was incredibly close, with a few defections its successors will be successful. This was a roll-call vote, so we know which way they voted!

Roll call votes for Amash Amendment:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml

Contact your congresscritters! If they voted for the amendment, tell them that you agree with their stand even if you hate them most of the time!

If they voted against it, contact them and tell them clearly and respectfully why this issue is important to you and that it affects your future support. Complain to them, and if their answers are not convincing go out and support a primary challenger!

I once worked for a company that used XMission's downtown SLC location as its colo location; excellent guys, and kick-ass service. That said, there's one other bit: a large number of their 30k customers are some rather large(-ish) corporations and companies - a few of whom have the ear of Sen. Orrin Hatch, among others in both state and federal government... not to mention (guessing this part, but given their location and name) they likely have a very strong hook into the LDS hierarchy.

Really, it's even more impressive. Pete Ashdown ran as a Democrat against Orrin Hatch in the 2006 senate election. Lost, of course, but Hatch ended up spending close to five megabucks on the campaign, and Ashdown did better than anyone else has against Hatch in recent memory, despite Hatch's ridiculous campaign funding and stranglehold on Utah politics.

Pete Ashdown is an impressively brave and principled individual, and it'd surprise me greatly if he even imagined any possible support from Hatch or the majority of the Church hierarchy in any civil liberties dispute with the feds. He's just a badass in general.

Two people go into a hotel room, apparently uninjured.

They subsequently leave the hotel room with documented physical injuries.

The physically weaker person provides a detailed account of their version of events, claiming that the physically stronger person attacked them, they were luckily able to fight off the stronger person and escape, but that the local (foreign) police did not pursue this case due to a lack of conclusive evidence.

The physically stronger person responds to these allegations with a blog post titled Lies, nuts, and the quest for attention, which focuses on ad hominem attacks and how very, very butthurt he is that people are even considering these allegations. The blog post does not provide any alternate explanation for the events that resulted in injuries to both parties, or any new information at all.

I'm having difficulty coming up with a rational explanation that doesn't include the stronger person being a predator who engineered a situation where they expected to face no consequences for their actions due to the victim being in an unfamiliar environment with limited support, the disinclination of local law enforcement to become involved in a dispute between foreign nationals, and engineered absence of conclusive evidence.

My opinion? I have no doubt that her story is substantively true. The argument that 'the polish police did not arrest me, so I must not have done it' is about as convincing as tissue paper to anyone who has seen the inconsistent results of even well-trained and well-equipped police forces-- if what we've seen so far is all he has to offer then he should be rightly shunned by the tech community and then some.

Given the alleged crime and narcissistic tone of the blog post, there are likely similar victims out there. Hopefully they will come forward as well.