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What we're seeing here is a crack in the government's facade of fake-goodness. The ideas we're fed are that justice is blind, which means (we're taught), ultimately fair; that prosecutors and judges and the legal system in general have our best interests at heart, and so on, platitude after platitude...

But the truth peers 'round the corner here. They're not interested in accuracy, else they'd be all for determining how well this works, or not. The process and the results would both be open. What they're interested in are convictions, because that's how they keep score. That's how the public is keeping score.

This is unfair and irresponsible on two fronts. First, if you get the wrong person for any reason (including using DNA evidence that is supposed to be basically infallible, but is, in fact, fallible); then you've done a wrong to that person, of course. But secondly, for every false conviction the prosecutor and their accomplices notch into their pistols, the real criminal is now completely free -- the case is closed. They're not even looking.

As a society, we need to stop trying to raise up any part of the system based upon count of arrests, convictions, tickets, etc. The temptation to go for easy answers is too high; obviously, if the FBI itself is victim to this, an organization that prides itself on its organizational integrity, groups that have less tradition of trying to do right -- like the local cops who broke down your neighbors door last week -- are going to fall even more prey to such pressures.

As we see that the FBI tries to prevent the truth from coming out about a tool that is less effective than they claim, as they try to prevent exonerating information from reaching the defense, we see true colors.

These people are not our defenders; they claim to be, but they have their own agenda, and it is not about fairness. They're simply counting scalps.

It is hard to believe the FBI won't do the study to get real numbers, but we've been here before. These are the same people who presented bullet lead evidence with equal certainty. The science is impressive but it means nothing when your original premise is wrong. In the bullet lead case, it turns out that matches were common and single boxes often had differences. The coincidence between two people is good reason to review the data and make sure DNA statistics are correct. Until that is done, the odds of DNA matches should be looked on with great skepticism.

It's screw ups like this that make the death penalty a bad idea. While life in prison is a terrible punishment, perhaps more cruel than death, it gives the state a chance to fix its mistakes.

When the Linux kernel first supported multiprocessor systems, it was done with a single lock protecting access to all the kernel (the Big Kernel Lock); the kernel could still only do one thing at a time. Over time, most sections of the kernel have introduced their own fine-grained locking and moved out from under the BKL, allowing many parts of the kernel to be running at the same time on multiple processors. The BKL has shrunk over time, but it still exists over a chunk of the kernel. The kernel hackers recently tried to replace the hard lock with a preemptable lock, but that had some bad interactions with the scheduler (which determines what process/kernel thread runs when), so Linus switched back to the old-style BKL.

Now, a group is trying to see if it is possible to weed out all the remaining uses of the BKL and replace them with localized locking for specific sections of the kernel. This is tricky, as there are side-effects of the BKL that are not always obvious.