being actually innocent of the crime isn't the courts job according to him.

It's generally not. The job of the court is to provide a fair trial, the job of the jury is to make the decision of guilt or innocence, and perfection at all costs is not a reasonable goal either. But please keep reading.

The discovery of new evidence clearly shows that a trial was not fair. It may have been fair at the time, but part of human progress is uncovering new truths, and our justice system should reflect that. DNA evidence has been an example of that -- people were convicted before it was testable, and exonerated afterward. But sometimes investigations are incomplete as well, and new evidence is honestly discovered, such as the Robert Durst handwriting and confession obtained during The Jinx.

On the other hand, allowing new evidence to result in a new trial incentivizes the willful withholding of evidence. Keep some evidence in your back pocket, and if you lose a trial, simply present it as new evidence and voila, retrial!

We need to come up with rules for new evidence to limit abuse, but the goal should still be to provide a fair trial, weighted toward keeping innocent people out of prison, but not at all costs.

the dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts â" and puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future.

Nobody is seriously proposing that STEM come at the expense of broad-based learning, nor does it have to. That may be a possibility, but it's a completely separate discussion. Any STEM degree from almost any accredited university still has humanities and "soft" sciences as prerequisites. What we can say is that test scores indicate that we're not doing very well at teaching math and sciences compared to the rest of the industrialized world. We're actually doing a lot of things worse than the rest of the industrialized world. (Except self-esteem. We're #1 at that!)

If you live inside city limits, your choice of whether to discharge a firearm is probably the bigger question.

You say that now, but wait until you have a penis growing out of your forehead.

I literally cannot wait for that.

For paper and plastics, that's true. Glass would be the best bet, since the melting or flash point of the coating(s) is almost certainly lower than that of glass, so it can easily be separated.

Yes there is. Competition. Absent collusion, someone will implement it in an attempt to gain or maintain market share. I'm not saying the free market is a panacea, but that's the incentive, and I suspect it's compelling enough in this case.

First, everything is a chemical.

But more importantly, there is no such thing as superfluous genitalia.

I thought they did this years ago.

You are aware that Star Trek is not surveillance footage sent to us from the future?

I was about to upgrade my hardware, but instead I just pulled all my DIMMs and I'm only using virtual memory now. My computer is like a million times faster, and I think it even got rid of some viruses that were hiding in memory.

Now if I could just figure out why that goddamned System Idle Process is using so much CPU time!!!!!

Pretty soon folks will get used to tuning out while driving

And I'm all for it. Bring on the self-driving cars already. I love driving -- on empty roads -- but the daily commute or errand run begs for automation.

Anyway, who obeys the speed limit? Faster traffic means less traffic, which benefits everyone.

It's not about whether or not the bill would pass, but about speaking up.

Also, Google is gathering signatures for surveillance reform here:
https://takeaction.withgoogle....

While I completely agree, I'm not sure the Slashdot Effect has existed for nigh a decade now.

Just the fact that its episodes weren't self-contained, it's subject matter was the rape and murder of a teenage girl, and the fact that it had supernatural elements made it pretty revolutionary for 1990.

Not true at all. "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" had rape in the first episode, and much of his stuff involved the supernatural. It could easily be argued that he was the pioneer of the genre in television, a good 40 years before Twin Peaks. Of course, judging by our relative moderation points, people want to believe good things about Twin Peaks, and so they do. I guess that's the X-Files connection.

As far as story arcs, the contemporary (to Twin Peaks) "Picket Fences" had all of the things you're describing as well. Incidentally, Picket Fences almost had an actual crossover with the X-Files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And I don't begrudge people who actually like Twin Peaks, even if I cannot fathom the reasons, but I do think it's more of a "it's good because people say it's good," phenomenon than anything else.

Agreed, "might."

For what it's worth, I never encouraged my daughter to pursue stereotypically female toys or activities. She seemed to prefer them either innately, or perhaps because her friends did. I did manage to get her interested in gaming though, although I'm supportive of whatever she finds fulfilling.