You are probably correct in cases where the cops aren't hiding things from the judge.

However, if one set of cops uses illegal means to find that a suspect did a crime then anonymously tips off another set of cops with enough information so that they could get a conviction if the tip had been given to them by someone outside the government then it's very unlikely that the shenanigans will ever be uncovered and it is very likely that the conviction will stand.

This "investigate once and ignore the rules, then do it again legally to cover our tracks" technique has a name but I can't remember it now.

Lower courts do it all the time.

Legally speaking, an unconditional pardon removes guilt. Moral guilt doesn't even depend on getting caught, it only depends on some absolute standard of behavior to which a person's actual behavior can be measured against.

Not always.

Take that NFL football player who was indicted last week for child abuse. He's not contesting the facts of the case. The media isn't rushing out to tar him as a child abuser, they seem to be waiting for this one to play out in front of a jury. I wonder how the press will react if a Texas jury looks at the undisputed facts and declares that his actions did violate Texas's child-abuse laws. My bet is that a few press outlets will be calling for change but most will not.

On the other hand, if the NFL doesn't hold him accountable in accordance with whatever policy was in effect at the time of the actual acts then the press will tar and feather top NFL officials - an act doesn't have to violate a criminal law to be so socially unacceptable that organizations like the NFL cannot be seen to tolerate it.

You mean that show on C-SPAN that shows Congressional committee hearings and votes in Congress?

Not to be confused with the Federal Trade Commission reality show, also on on C-SPAN.

1) It denies innocent people their rights.

2) Because it rightfully results in guilty people going free, actual victims may be denied justice.*

*For the sake of argument let's assume I'm talking about a crime where everyone agrees there is an actual victim e.g. burglary, assault, etc. - I acknowledge that at least a small percentage of /. readers (NOT including myself) may consider typical cases of possession or downloading child porn as being a victimless crimes, making this particular case less than ideal for supporting my argument that bad policing is bad for the 2nd reason stated above.

You can bet your $THINGOFVALUE here that the CIA and similar organizations are already researching this if they don't have it already.

Like handwriting recognition this will be full of examples of "bad output" in the early days and there will always be cases where lack of context and/or deliberate obfuscation by the speaker makes this unreliable.

Let's just assume that this will be as reliable 5 or 10 years from now as automated face recognition is today and within 20 years both will be very reliable. What do we do about it as a society? Do we pass laws and adopt social norms such that only "authorized" people can use this technology? Do we pass laws requiring that people be put on notice if their lips are being read by a computer without a court order or something similar? Do we become a society where people just expect that anything they say in public will be picked up and understood by a computer, likely in real-time?

I should have said 1080i, not 1080p. My point was, if both television programs (as seen by the viewer) take up so much bandwidth that there is not enough room for the other program to be at "maximum quality," then the other program will not be at "maximum quality" and the earlier editor's claim that channel-sharing (typically) results in a lower maximum-quality show (as displayed on the customer's screen) is true.

Also, of course the two companies must cooperate in a technical sense. I should have clarified that by "cooperate" I meant in a business sense, as in "okay, you want to transmit an HD program from 7-8PM on December 1 and you say that the nature of the program requires that you use minimal compression and you will need at least 15 Mbit/s of the available bandwidth? We already have plans to broadcast a show at 720p during that time slot. We can't both be on at the same time. How about you do your broadcast with some compression from 7-8PM then replay it after midnight with minimal compression when we are off the air?"

If the stations cooperate in this way and the viewer watches both the heavily-compressed and the lightly-compressed version of the 1080i show, there will almost certainly be perceptible differences in quality.

On the other hand, of the stations cannot cooperate, say, because the station that is not doing the 1080i program is airing 720p programming 24x7, then the viewer will be stuck with the lower-quality version.

That's not relevant.

What is relevant is that you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip.

If you are logically splitting the bandwidth with another broadcaster and you are broadcasting a show that uses 50% of the bandwidth, that only leaves 50% for the other broadcaster. If you want to broadcast a show that requires more bandwidth, such as a typical HD (1080p) television show, it can't do it unless the other broadcaster isn't trying to use more than the remaining bandwidth during that time period.

Assuming you can't get the other broadcaster to cooperate, you can't broadcast with the same "quality" (as defined by resolution and frequency-of-scene-changes) as you could if you controlled the entire 6MHz channel.

If by "quality" the original poster meant "maximum picture quality" i.e. the combination of resolution and ability to change the image over time, he is correct. If by "quality" he meant things like noise/static, then for practical purposes you are correct.

A 6MHz channel can support 1 HD channel plus some leftover room, a 50/50 split of that channel cannot.

Not true. Digital television frequencies are basically the same as the analog ones, with some channels either no longer used or no longer used except under special circumstances (e.g. grandfathered stations, low-power stations, etc.).

In practice, most US digital TV stations are UHF stations between channels 14 and 69.

In places like near the borders where the police routinely randomly pull people over to search, NOT consenting will give them every reason to detain, bother, and harass you on the possibly-still-statistically-valid (well, it used to be valid, I don't know if still is) assumption that people who refuse consent are more likely to be hiding something than those who do consent.

In these situations, where they plan on doing a cursory search of every random vehicle they pull over, consenting will almost always get you on your merry way in a reasonable period of time - less time than not consenting. Why? Because the police don't want to waste time with someone who "looks like a regular person" if doing so will let many more people - some of whom may be "up to no good" - get through without being pulled over.

Of course, if you've already given the police a reason to want to harass you even through no fault of your own, such as (hypothetically) having a bumper sticker promoting a sports team that the cop hates, or if you are just unlucky enough to get pulled over by a cop that is in a bad mood, you may be screwed whether you consent or not.

Physical goods, like the neurons in my brain, decay over time. Sorry about that folks.

There are probably other obvious clerical errors, but I trust you guys can figure out what I meant to say.

Physical good decay over time.

In principal, once something is digitized and stored on archival media in an un-encumbered (patent/etc.-free) published format, it will be available forever, without further degradation. Once the copyrights do expire (and except for rare exceptions like Peter Pan, the will), the digitized copies can be made available to the public.

Having digital copies also means you can have a second digital copy that is stored "offline and stored hundreds of km away," which is important if the item if the library burns down or if the city the library is in becomes a war zone and not only the library but other "local" locations that house the "offsite backups" are destroyed.

The deterioration due to time isn't going to be critical for most texts, but for photographs, paintings, and other material that may have been published on non-archival material, getting it scanned now sure beats waiting for the copyright to expire before scanning.

On this 9/11 anniversary, we have to remind ourselves of the loss that can happen when "the only copies" are destroyed: The photo archive of the construction of the World Trade Center was housed at the World Trade Center. There was no offsite backup. When the buildings were destroyed, so was this photo-archive.