Plea deals are a bug-fix for wasted efforts in the courts, but like many bug-fixes, they contain their own bugs.
If the court process is expensive enough, any organization with money can can almost always bankrupt someone with less money, and thereby force them into accepting a plea deal. If it's officers of the court (prosecutors) it's particularly heinous: they're using the defendant's money against them..
The bug-fix needs a bug-fix, one that isn't subject to being gamed. In Canada we used to have supported programmes for fighting unjust laws, and even unfair convictions. We still have them, but they're done almost completely pro-bono. IMHO, the government of the day seems quite unwilling to pay for anything that advances the cause of justice...
--dave
No, IANAL, I'm just grumpy about at political attacks on and perversion of natural justice.
Pluto and Charon were observed for an entire rotation of each body; a “day” on Pluto and Charon is 6.4 Earth days. The first of the images was taken when New Horizons was about 3 billion miles from Earth, but just 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) from Pluto—about 30% farther than Earth’s distance from the Sun. The last frame came 6½ days later, with New Horizons more than 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) closer.
The wobble easily visible in Pluto’s motion, as Charon orbits, is due to the gravity of Charon, about one-eighth as massive as Pluto and about the size of Texas.
Our view of Pluto, and Charon, is only going to get better as New Horizons zooms towards its July fly-by.
much less. Maybe the ability to run it in a couple of 3U boxes: I'd have to spreadsheet it to see.
It should be: around the time of the acquisition the price performance ratio finally got back to where it was with the first SPARCs: ten times the price, 100 times the performance .
A 3U 4-socket T5 machine had about 128 full hardware threads (really: cores) the last time I looked seriously at it. The performance was a bit less than a 32-socket, 4-core-per -socket M9000, the machines I mostly worked with. In those days, I was a capacity planner and performance engineer at Sun Canada.
A lot, but not everything, is still available open-source from SPARC International.
--dave
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
