Scenario: You have been set up by someone else to take the fall for a murder. They stole your gun, used it to shoot the victim, and then put it back. Realizing what had been done, you chose to hide the gun because all the evidence would unfairly point to you. You don't know who did it and have no evidence to prove what happened. The prosecutor asks "Do you own a gun that fires this type of bullet?" followed by "And where is that gun located?"

Without the right to silence you are left in a scenario where you'd be forced to either commit perjury (by saying you don't know where it is) or provide evidence that you know will be misleading to your own detriment. If the prosecutor could use your refusal to answer as a point against you, you could be convicted anyways.

Your FAIL 3 applies, but the condition itself FAILS on several counts:

FAIL 3 is flawed in that it implies that acquitting a guilty person is equal in "wrongness" to convicting an innocent person. I do not believe this to be the case, if for no other reason than that a guilty person can be later caught and their punishment enforced, but an innocent person cannot be "un-punished" and have their lost freedom or life restored.

It is additionally flawed because it would prevent any laws that hamper investigation work for the protection of innocents. By applying your same logic in other circumstances we would have to allow the police to shoot at anyone they want, since the immunity from being randomly shot is equally beneficial to both criminals and non-criminals. We would also want to strike the 4th amendment (since it lets criminals hide stuff as just as well as innocent people), and then we'd want to look into many other situations.

To boot, your supporting statement about a law that hampers all investigations equally being equivalent to deciding guilt by random choice is some sort of logical fallacy, but it's so illogical I'm having a hard time classifying it; it's some terrifying love child of a straw man, false dichotomy, faulty cause/effect, and slippery slope argument. It's so wrong can't even really argue against it except to point out that protecting some percentage of all people from conviction is in no way equal to randomly punishing all people regardless of guilt or innocence, since in the first case innocent people are still safe but in the latter case they have an equal chance of being convicted when compared to a guilty person. It falls apart further from there, but the point has been made.

Shoddy logic here man, and it undermines whatever legitimacy your argument had to begin with.

Does anyone else notice that odd numbers seem to be the ones skipped to create that jagged graph? Perhaps below a certain threshold (95 by appearances) they simply round up to the nearest even number for some reason? I'd be interested to see those charts re-rendered for even numbers only.

The notes about how skewed some of the bell curves are actually raises more questions about the test than the grading to me. A perfectly even bell curve seems like it would only appear if the test was full of equally difficult questions worth the same number of points. If instead there are a large number of easy, valuable questions and a small number of very difficult low-value questions I'd expect to see a charts like these: ones that rise towards that "easy" point total, and then drop off sharply at the range earned for those last few very hard questions.

Also as many people have said: I'm not surprised to see a "grace" gap just below the failure mark; it seems like the kind of thing most colleges would do to avoid debates about grades and ensure they don't fail someone based on a single unlucky error or math mistake. The way they're doing it, anyone who fails fails by a LOT, making debate unlikely.

Of course people can produce stuff as easily as drawing in Paint or GIMP, using something like Zbrush. The problem is that they're going to get about the same level of quality that the average untrained artist would get out of Paint or GIMP, i.e. blobs and uneven stick figures.

Fact is, producing well-engineered 3d modeled parts or art objects takes technical skill and/or artistic craftsmanship that is beyond the average untrained consumer. Just as your average consumer could not be expected to paint well with oils, sculpt well in clay, or machine well in aluminum, so to they should not be expected to design well in polygons.

The real revolution in 3d printing will be tied to people feeling comfortable learning to design and a broader universal availability of art and design education.

Also, the event you're responding to happened over a year ago. February 2012.

Still they should have been toning things down, but he'd just won the election. A certain amount of fanfare is in order, and we weren't in quite such dire straits at the time.

The obvious solution is to go so fast the radiation never catches up. I hear that electromagnetic energy has some sort of hard speed limit, perhaps they could just go a little faster than that?

Bitcoins yo.

The issue here is that the builder was obviously aware that his tools were being used for illegal activity but continued to produce them for those same clients. His knowledge was demonstrated by his freakout about the massive piles of cash and demand to have them removed, and the fact that he knew his customers were crossing borders with his secret compartments. (They were calling from places like Tijuana asking for repairs)

"I don't know what this is being used for" is a legit argument when there's a reasonable expectation that the product is not being used for illegal activity (such as in the stated case of building robots), but at a certain point it crosses the threshold where any reasonable explanation would point to illegal use. At that point the person making the product is arguably liable, since any reasonable person should understand what their product is being used for.

In the example of a robot, just making a robot that can patrol an area wouldn't cross that threshold. If, however, the robot was commissioned with the ability to detect police badges, interpret police scanner data, and incinerate packages if police were detected en-route? That would cross the threshold of "Well what the fuck did you THINK they were gonna use it for?"

No, but the precedent exists that if a firearm or firearm component is intentionally designed to skirt the law or enable illegal activity it can itself be made illegal. Silencers, ceramic guns, plastic guns, cop-killer (bulletproof vest piercing) rounds, etc. are all illegal because there's no legitimate and legal use for them.

Thus if a gun-maker became specialized in ceramic weapons that can bypass metal detectors, and sold them to guys who paid massive amounts of money and didn't want their identities known? He could arguably be tried for conspiracy since it should be obvious to any reasonable person approximately what the guns were to be used for. "I don't know" only carries weight when there are plausible alternatives that aren't illegal.

Ah, but they didn't PAY him to vote: they paid for the privilege of being his life advisers, and he is simply following their advice. (Or at least that's what he'll say in court once they vote on his possible responses)

Well, at the time of these writings judaism was the hot new religion on the block. If they just said "Yaweh" people would have been all "Wha? Who's Yaweh? Is he like a guy or a god or a monster or what?" They added "Elohim" to clarify that he was a in fact a god.

By the same token, if they'd just referred to him with "Elohim", which was the title "god", people would have been confused; "Which god? Like all of them, or are we expected to know already somehow?"

You have to recall that most modern cultures are a relative monoculture compared to the vibrant mix of religions and ideas that were mingled in the pre-abrahamic Mediterranean region. There were dozens of religions, which mixed and combined to form the modern ones. A lot of them started in totally different regions and with totally different bases, but realized that their ideals and stories were similar enough to combine at some point. That's where a lot of the inconsistency in the early Old Testament comes from: these were almost certainly not all stories about the same god when they were first written, they were likely edited and combined under the guidance of what would become the earliest Judaic preists.

It's what (chip) plants crave!

I guess my biggest complaint would be: How good is truth serum at verifying the type of insanity claimed, and what qualification does the judge have to diagnose the suspect's mental condition? The human brain and psychoactive drugs are a horribly complex nest of interconnected issues, and even trained professionals can't always predict the effect they'll have on abnormal brains or in abnormal combinations

For example:
Let's say he really is insane, but the truth serum they use temporarily stabilizes him by suppressing an overactive region in his brain. Now during the test he'll be perfectly sane and normal, but as soon as the drug wears off he goes back to crazytown.

It's not the size of the screen, it's the multi-touch capacity.

>> ...which will be made available to the public to help keep citizens informed on the latest developments in the science and medical fields.

The thing people always seem to miss with these prizes that the football and oscar people don't? Marketing. If you want the average citizen to care, you need to MAKE them care. Take 5 of that 33 million and use it to film a series detailing some of the competitors. Focus on their personal investments in their inventions, their struggles, etc. so that people become invested in them as human beings. Spend some more money to advertise the shit out of it during prime time and on various interweb outlets like Hulu.

When the awards show happens, and it should be a show, book a couple major performances and a popular celebrity as host. Invite some major celebrities with philanthropic or scientific interests and ensure they get a good amount of screen time talking about what's going on.

Embracing that sort of celebrity culture is a kind of selling out, but it's a kind that needs to be seriously considered if you want to invest the average celebrity-focused person on the ideas at hand.