And that is a problem. It turns people who are not judges into judges.

Your presume that it would be better if every dispute was adjudicated by a judge. I disagree.

Facilitating letting people sort things out amongst themselves is usually the best policy. Lots of tribal systems use many of those informal approaches and while its not suitable for every situation, and its good that one can fall back to the courts, it really works a lot better in many situations than our adversarial system with a bunch of lawyers and judge.

The 92% guilty rate is not the interesting part. Rather what strikes me is that 97% of the "guilty" have "confessed".

Again... WHY is that interesting? Is it different in OTHER countries? Is it possible that 97% of guilty cases are along the lines of my example... where the defendant is merely pleading guilty to doing EXACTLY what he or she did; since the evidence is overwhelmingly conclusive.

I mean, I have kids. 97% of the time I bust them for something they confess to it too. Because they know I've busted them; either I've caught them red handed or the evidence is irrefutable. They aren't being coerced into false confessions... they did something wrong, and they got caught.

It is perfectly normal and healthy to just admit it; and then make reparations and seek forgiveness.

It would be better if our justice system was more like that. In Canada (and elsewhere I presume) a lot of the native groups have their own justice systems that are more traditional. They are overseen by a "real judge" and the outcomes need to be approved but they are largely autonomous, and in many respects I think its a better system than our more adversarial one.

There is no such thing as a legitimate coerced confession ("plea bargain"), the very concept is antithetical to most ideas of justice.

Equating "plea bargain" with "coerced confession" is invalid. There are lot of plea bargains where it is not a coerced confession.

If I get into a bar fight, grab a bottle, and hit someone with it. (And when its over, everyone involved is fine, a bit of bruising etc...)

That's still aggravated assault. They've got plenty of evidence and a conviction is all but inevitable. Its not an overcharge, its exactly what I did.

So my lawyer suggests we offer to plea in exchange for a suspended sentence. I've got no record, the prosecution figures there's good odds that'll be the outcome anyway... I get quick closure and to move on, less time is wasted and the tax payer saves a bunch of money.

How exactly is that antithetical to justice? What would be more just exactly?

I am not here asserting what is the "right" conviction rate

That is exactly what you are doing by asserting that 92% is somehow improper. So what do you think a proper rate would be?

Rather I simply assert that our American system of coerced false confession is patently unjust and immoral.

It is. When it happens. But how often does it happen exactly? How do I know how much its going on? You cited the 92% guilt-pleas / found guilt rate as your sole point of evidence. But when I called you on it, you backed away from it meaning anything specific.

If we eliminate the "problem of coerced false confessions" what exactly would that do to the conviction rate exactly? If you can't quantify that meaningfully then why should I be impressed or convinced by the 92% statistic? Why even bring it up?

Consider that "of the 82,092 defendants terminated during Fiscal Year 2013, 75,718, or 92 percent, either pled guilty or were found guilty"

What about the other 8%?

Were those not-guilty? Or does it include defendants whose cases that were dismissed at some point along the way?

At 92% guilty rate might mean what you say, or it might mean that cases against are largely settled and dropped during the pre-trial process.

And what about legitimate plea-bargains? Where the defendant pleads guilty to a lesser version of something ACTUALLY DID for expediency. And not just out of fear of being massively "over-convicted" at trial?

Or its a combination of all of the above. I don't think I disagree with you that "over-charging occurs" but; even without overcharging we'd see very high conviction rates. Its not worth the prosecutions time to prosecute cases until they think they WILL win.

Or to turn the tables on you ... What do you think a reasonable conviction rate SHOULD BE?

putting your full weight on the door is NOT normal treatment

I watched the video. I didn't see him put his full weight on it. I couldn't say how much weight he did put on it .. 10kg, 20kg? Maybe 40kg? Even that seems pretty reasonable for it to endure without being ruined.

I would be concerned if the hinge DIDN'T give way with someone's full weight on it

You mean like nearly every other surface in your home? I mean what if you fell neck first on your tub? Does it give way? What if you fell neck first onto your toilet? Does it give way? What about your coffee table? Filing cabinet? Kitchen table? The railing along your decks, balconies, and stairs? Do all those give way when you do a neck-first-dive on their edges?

Are you In fact, concerned that they don't? Because I could easily crush your throat on all of them if I were so inclined.

I probably wouldn't even think to use the washing machine door.... there's a toilet just a few feet further away, and that lets me combine drowning and humiliation with throat crushing.

Sure sounds like dirty prosecutorial tactics: deny the defendants access to their own income and property so they will have a hard time putting up a defense.

What's the alternative? They don't seize evidence of a crime, defeating their ability to prosecute the case, because the criminals are using evidence in question to make money...??

That's bonkers.

Cellular reception is lousy in my basement, Wifi however is top notch. It would be REALLY nice if my phone switched to wifi even if it only did it when it was at home.

For me its not about saving money, its just about working well.

It could also be a nice feature for traveling etc; I could probably avoid paying for roaming in a lot of situations. (In this case, it would be about saving some money. Roaming is ludicrous.)

As it is, my carrier (Rogers) does have "Rogers One" which is a voip app that you can use with your phone service to send and receive calls and text messages over wifi from smartphones, tablets, and there's even a (usable but not great) browser based version for desktops. Its ~great~ in theory, but its a little klutzy since I basically have two separate phone apps on my phone the real one for 'real calls' and the rogers one for 'wifi calls'. And its bit clumsy handing calls off between them or selecting which one to use receiving a call when i am on wifi and cellular. So I don't actually have the app on my phone (an S5).

But... I DO have it installed it on my old galaxy s3, and turned the cellular radio off. And its become a wifi-only extension of my cell phone which works great anywhere in my house. (Plus with only wifi-on and the cell radio off... battery life of the S3 ... my only real complaint with the phone is quite good.) Its better than call forwarding to a home line or voip because -outgoing- calls are still identified with my number -- this is really valuable to me. It can also send/receive SMS to/from my usual cell number... which is also really handy.

And when I was travelling, I took it with me. And use it where I was staying on wifi... where again it was nice to be able to just make and receive calls to and from my normal number via wifi. Without having to mess around with forwarding, or people screening out my calls because they were coming from some random unknown-to-them-voip number. (I've used free/low-cost voip services in the past with travelling, and that was always a hassle.)

Did you watch the video?

He opened the door, and applied his weight to it. Apparently this damaged the hinges.

I couldn't tell whether he put a reasonable or unreasonable stress on it. A reasonable amount of test would be completely acceptable; and a perfectly valid 'test'. When I shop for cars, its something I look at ... how solid the doors are, do they have any play in them, etc.

Further the video follows the CCTV footage with commercials demonstrating the door, ... " Look how solid it is!" while they push down on it; showing a child sitting on it... etc. Its a selling point that the door isn't flimsy.

So... was the guy attempting to damage it? Or was he just curious how solid it was? Did he push harder than reasonable?

I don't think its cut and dry either way. Let the courts decide.

Yep. If you start censoring them, then you are effectively doing the job of terrorists by trying to remove freedom.

Real life isn't Star Wars, the terrorists don't win if we "give into the dark side" to fight them. We just lose.

They don't win. They will never be... So, the west has become a police state, with lots of censorship, and they round up anyone who they suspect of disagreeing with their government and send them to re-education camps. That's it boys, we've won. Job done. Lets go home. Not going to happen.

Its important not to conflate "us losing" with "them winning". Because that leads to rhetoric like this... "if we do X, then the terrorists win"... which is nonsense. It's not a win for them. Its not what they are fighting about AT ALL. And it masks what they really ARE fighting about.

We shouldn't lose sight of that.

Censorship is bad, and should be fought for many many reasons, but "doing the job of terrorists" isn't one of them.

This isn't the teaching materials. This is a test question.

You are addressing the original article, and you are right on a test its a perfectly fine question. I agree with your argument.

My post was really just addressing the post I responded too, rather than the original article though, and that was in the context of teaching rather than testing.

If you have an embedded system that does not have a spare register for couinting but has built-ins for jumps, recursion is faster than iteration. If on the other hand you have built-ins for counting iterations, with a JPNZ, loops are more efficient.

That's really more of a compiler optimization issue.

It's like teaching a kid long division using 6000 / 10, and disparaging the example saying, "yeah, but you would never use long division for that." Well, no shit, Sherlock. You're teaching mechanics.

But the mechanics of long division in that example are reduced to trivial busywork. That not a complicated enough example to even really see the mechanics properly.

It'd be like using Newton's method on a sample problem that converges to an absolute final answer after a single iteration, or teaching someone how to calculate the area of a trapezoid and using a square as the example problem to solve. Sure the formula works on a square but its not really instructive.

Application is for another lesson. Maybe even another class.

I'd argue that the solution to a problem is a lot easier to understand if you're given a context where the solution is needed FIRST. Starting with a degenerate problem that reduces to a trivial application serves to obscure the 'point' of the solution method.

I actually have ad block on my phone, but I had the 'allow unobtrusive ads' checked; but that stupid little tab at the bottom of /. this morning prompted me to uncheck it, which seems to have gotten rid of the ad for now... but I prefer browsing with 'allow unobtrusive ads'

But that ad wasn't unobtrusive. It was animated, and it wouldn't scroll away (fixed to screen coordinates)... those are the definition of OBTRUSIVE.

soylentnews is supposed to be /. without Dice's nonsense... its getting ever more tempting.

So some fucking OTA update is going to fail while you're in the middle of driving because it just happened without asking you?

Nice strawman you've constructed. The one car that does OTA updates right now (Tesla) downloads them and then prompts you when to do them, so you can wait until your home in your garage. You don't hear any Tesla owners complaining do you?

Mobile phones are another device with OTA update support. Have you heard a lot of stories where the phone interrupted a 911 call to do an ota update and then failed? No? Because it never happens. The phone says theres an update ready, and waits for you initiate... most of them will even refuse to go if you are low battery, and most recommend you be plugged into a charger for the update... absolutely none ever have just spontaneously decided to update during a call.

This is so incredibly stupid as to defy belief.

Why manufacture imaginary problems to be outraged about; there are plenty of real problems in the world. But OTA updates isn't one of them.

I think that says more about crappy college poetry than the state of computer AI...

I agree it doesn't really do anything to advance the state of AI.

For example I could program my computer to make Rorschach inkblot patterns relatively easily, and many of them would be pleasing to the eye, and people would see flowers, butterflys, erotica, and nightmares in them.

But the computer didn't put those ideas there, and it doesn't make the computer program an artist.
An artist has something to say; the computer doesn't.

This display raises and makes clear the disconnect between the artists message and the viewers response and shows us clearly that the viewer can have a significant response to a piece even if there was no message at all; provided the viewer is "primed" to look for one.

This is an issue I have with much art, especially minimalist abstract art ... where I genuinely doubt the artist did anything of substance at all, and is merely relying on the viewer to project significance and meaning into it by suggesting it is "art" therefore there MUST be some, and if you can't see it then the fault must be your own inadequacy. The emperors new cloths of the art world so-to-speak.

This poem is in the same vein. It is sufficiently complicated and constructed of phrases of words that are semantically related so that if we are primed to look for meanings, then like a Rorschach inkblot, we can find one.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.

Yet, all that doesn't imply there is really anything wrong with college poetry though. The poets are learning to express themselves... perhaps somewhat awkwardly. And that awkwardness is part of the total expression. And that's fine.

Let me know when the AI is trying to actually express an idea and the result is poetic. Of course, for that the AI would actually need an idea to express.

All this one has is some word soup and some methods for selecting them involving some sort of semantic grouping so they seem to be thematic, some loose grammer rules to put them next to each other; and maybe some loose poem structural templates or something ... or maybe not.