That's simply the difference between a criminal case, and a civil suit. The burden of proof in a criminal case is "beyond a reasonable doubt". In a civil case, it's much lower, only requiring a "preponderance of the evidence". I'm sure this is what you were referring to, but people are frequently unaware that there's a big difference.

You'd need to have a much larger court system to handle the load. There would likely be thousands of new cases in Missouri right now.

How difficult would it be for someone to force you to stick your finger on the sensor?

Clang has some builtins that allow you to get the carry bit, so you can cheaply write code that branches on carry. We (mostly CERT, I helped a bit) had a proposal for inclusion in C11 that would have added qualifiers on integers explicitly defining their overflow behaviour as trapping or wrapping, along with a model that let this be implemented cheaply (e.g. allowing a set of side-effect-free code to propagate temporary results and only trap if one of them along the way overflowed). Sadly, it didn't make it into the standard.

Integer overflow has been in the top five causes of CVEs for several years running. Buffer overflows, sadly, are still at the top.

If you can't call native code, you probably don't have a working JVM. The Oracle JDK and OpenJDK each include around a million lines of C in their standard libraries. That doesn't mean that you won't find it easier to write secure code in Java, it just means that you probably don't have much less C code in your TCB for a Java program than you do for a C one.

Walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe failed because they had to compete with everyone else. In the early '90s, there was a lot of content that was exclusive to AOL or CompuServe. There were a load of small BBS that had their own unique content. And then there was the Internet. Anyone could put something on the Internet and when web browsers started to be easy to install anyone could put up a web page. Individuals would put things up on their ISPs' web space or somewhere like Geocities, big companies would buy their own servers. Small individual ISPs started to spring up, because the cost of entry was low: a rack of modems, a leased line, and a load of phone lines and you could be an ISP. Local ISPs competed by differentiating themselves in various ways (free email, free web space, static IPs, whatever).

Meanwhile, AOL and CompuServe (OSPs - Online Service Providers) were trying to sell access but also be responsible for all of the content. The parallel with Facebook isn't quite there, because they're only selling the content. The problem is that, while there is some content on Facebook, anyone who can access Facebook can also access the whole of the web. They need to somehow justify putting content on Facebook (where only Facebook users can see it) rather than just putting it on a web site. Their argument for this is that they can collect lots of data about potential customers if you do, but it's not clear that this is a good long-term alternative.

That was more true a year ago than it is now. Modern smartphones and data plans mean that email is becoming as easy as SMS for a lot of people who would previously only check it when they actively went to their computer. This is also true of the older generation, who previously might have turned on the computer once every day or two for email, but now increasingly have tablets that can do email, thanks to companies like Amazon selling appliances that are mainly there for videos and ebooks..

The useful gadget to sell would be something cheap (under $50) that has a small array of microphones and listens to a predefined set of tones, then produces calibration data telling your audio source what it needs to do to compensate for the poor acoustics and speaker placement in the owner's living room.

I actually have mixed feelings there. The cities make tons of extra tax money simply because of the teams existence. But yeah, I'm not in favor of them funding new stadiums and such.

You can be convicted, as Scott Peterson was, based only on circumstantial evidence.

If you think Morse sent over a Ham radio connection is equivalent to a telegram, then you're missing the point. It's only equivalent if someone prints it off at the far end and couriers it to the recipient.

You'd probably use a short sequence for each of the brushstrokes and compose Kanji like from them. There's an input method (Cangee? Something like that) that works like this with a QWERTY keyboard. From 26 brush strokes, it can compose any Kanji and is apparently the fastest way of entering Kanji on a computer, although it takes a while to learn.

This, along with the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, etc., etc., are nothing more than big business. When players are bought and sold, the "team" with the most money normally wins. I'm very much in favor of seeing elite competition, but all of the chest thumping by teams like this is meaningless.

A little over a decade ago was when Apple announced that laptop sales had passed desktop sales for them. This wasn't surprising, because their desktops were far less competitive than their laptops (and no one bought an Apple desktop to save money). The rest of the industry followed about two years later. We've been in a world where more laptops are sold than desktops for almost a decade. Even accounting for the fact that laptops are replaced rather than upgraded, there are now more people who use laptops as their only computer than there are desktop users.