Yeah, they probably would get the message pretty quick. But let's be real here, we're not going to send that message. To keep their two-party system going, they don't have to fool all the people, just 67% of them (at worst). Which, as it turns out, is pretty easy.

Not blaming others for your mistakes is not a nerd thing, it's an adult thing. Lack of social skills and owning your mistakes are not positively correlated, and that's being charitable. Quit romanticizing being a nerd. The conclusions you seem to be drawing from it are inaccurate at best.

Yes, being on a jury is what determines whether you're using the law's standards. If you're not on the jury, you're just a person forming their own opinion, and you can do that however you want.

The thing I took issue with was

That's the crazy assertion. It might have looked that way to this one uneducated (in this particular court case, I'm not trying to make a statement about the poster's general education) person, but it's silly in the extreme to think that your familiarity with a case that likely amounts to short blurbs should outweigh a full trial by jury.

I don't have a problem with coming to a different conclusion, but to think that your conclusion, based off what you read on Slashdot, is more correct than 12 people who sat and listened to the defendant alone talk for 11 days straight and that we should let the guy go free because of the court of public opinion, that's ... I don't even know what to call logic like that. And heck, it wasn't even the court of public opinion either, most people did think he did it as far as I could see, it's just this one guy that thinks he should have gone free because he wasn't personally convinced. It's so off the wall, the more I think about it, the more I think we've all been trolled.

Oh, and there's also the fact that he was found guilty of first-degree murder, so yes, it's certainly "instead of". The jury also had the option of finding for a lesser charge, involuntary manslaughter, but they felt that not only was the evidence was strong enough to convict, but to also go with the higher charge.

I think you may be confused by the fact that he was allowed to plead down to second-degree murder after he was found guilty. This was most likely done in order to nip any appeals in the bud, and also because the evidence, although convincing, was not something that would remain convincing when the entire trial was compressed into a two-sentence soundbite, which is all most people care to educate themselves with before deciding guilt in their own minds. I think the case for that being a correct assumption has been made pretty well in this thread.

Later, he was sued for killing his children's mother (unsure if they sued or someone sued on their behalf), and repeatedly stated that he killed their mother in order to protect them from her. He lost that too, and was ordered to pay them $60m. If you still have doubt, it's most likely due to being uninformed.

Incorrect, the criteria is "beyond a reasonable doubt". Very, very little can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. For instance, it's not beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was framed, and then coerced into confessing. It's possible. Heck, it's happened. But I don't think it's reasonable to think that's what happened in this case.

Since he did plead guilty, I imagine that at least he was under the impression that there was sufficient evidence to find him guilty, and the most likely reason for that is that he did in fact commit the crime. Unless you've got an argument that's more convincing than a confession that involves producing the hidden body, I fail to see why we should have let him go.

The thing is, the only reason the evidence was iffy at all was because they didn't have a body, whose importance itself is kind of an artifact of law--although it's very important in some cases, I don't think many people would credibly think that Nina just up and left the country and her kids with nothing more than the clothes on her back.

He had a "how to murder your wife and get away with it" book that he purchased right before she went missing, and absolutely no justification for why he was hosing out his car or why the passenger seat was missing. Maybe it looked to you like there was some reason to let him go because your personal standard of proof (instead of the legal one) wasn't met with the extremely filtered view you got of court proceedings (I'd be surprised if you got 5% of the facts that were presented in the courtroom), but the fact is Hans is a murderer, and he got caught. The system worked in this case. It seems an odd choice to criticize the standard of proof used in legal proceedings and then pick an example where you've already been proven wrong.

Seriously. Maybe this kid's dad is different, and he sees it every day, but I know that anything that made my dad cry would have sure as hell traumatized me.

What I don't understand is why you would measure "production" of a gas as a unit of volume. And if you're going to do that, why wouldn't you include the pressure as well? Doesn't this tell us basically nothing, or is there some sort of standard I don't know about?

Not that I don't think he did it--to be honest, I'd give it about a 60% chance that he did--but he was never a suspect. He was a "person of interest".

Well, there was that, and the whole agreeing to show them where he hid the body in exchange for a lighter sentence thing.

I guess you could theorize that someone else killed her and he was forced to watch them hide the body for some reason, but that's as crazy as ... wait. John McAfee? Is that you?

Yeah, didn't consider that. Geez. A good point from an AC. What the hell happened to /.?

Seriously. This is an insult to our intelligence. Of course, it'll probably fly because most people haven't had to deal with the inevitable conclusion when they change their mind, or the business isn't growing fast enough and they have to find money somewhere, or enough time has passed that they think they can get away with it, or somebody else is in charge with different notions of what a promise means and is empowered by this clause.

"Oh, no, we won't ever actually do that. It's just in the contract because ... uh ... well, it's just there! Don't worry about it!"

Yep. Ain't no other way. Write stuff.

Even better, write stuff that's hard. Read stuff. Read really complicated stuff, and try to make it do other stuff. Nothing will teach you good programming practices like knowing why you follow them, and nothing will tell you why like seeing the hell that comes of not following them, which any large project is almost guaranteed to contain plenty of examples of. From misnamed or misused variable/functions, to multiple (and therefore slowly diverging) implementations of the same logic, to spending weeks reinventing something already solved in your programming language's standard library because they didn't like the order of arguments on a function, to bringing in a massive overcomplicated framework to solve a simple problem due to a too-strong avoidance of NIH (not that you shouldn't beware of NIH, you just shouldn't let it lead you into trying to pound a space shuttle into a square hole), you'll see it all.

Fix some bugs for a large FOSS project. Pick things that are just slightly over your head, and then pretend someone's breathing down your neck to get it done yesterday. Pick a project where you don't just get to commit changes, find something where your code is reviewed before it's accepted. You'll find a lot of honesty in people that aren't getting paid and don't give a shit about alienating you, and if you can handle a bruised ego you'll learn a lot.

One thing I wouldn't suggest doing is writing code for other people on your own, not right away. It's not that you shouldn't do that eventually, just don't do it when you care more about accomplishing your goal than you do about learning until you've got some good habits firmly established. Otherwise, your bad habits will just become reinforced, since they're usually easier especially when you're only looking at your own code, and to to be honest, you probably don't know the difference between a good habit and a bad habit until you've worked on a large project with a lot of people.

The best thing about working on FOSS projects is, you'll actually be able to demonstrate work to future employers. That goes a long way in an interview or on a resume.

Since we're considering crimes he was indicted for but wasn't found guilty, he should consider himself lucky that he doesn't have to serve time for all the crimes he wasn't indicted for. If he did, he'd be spending eternity in jail!