AFAIK in the US it's a federal crime to tamper with mail while it's being delivered, i.e. as long as it's with the USPS. But once it's delivered, I think it's treated as any other possession. I.e. I don't think it's necessarily a federal crime for me to break into your mailbox and steal a letter, unless the specifics of the case make it so (for instance, if your mailbox was on federal land for some reason).

I agree. I'm afraid I found myself playing devil's advocate for a position I'm not partial to.

I'd go for an over-inflated plastic bag and a firm strike from the palm of your hand. If nail clippers can land you in jail, this is Gitmo worthy shit right there.

Yeah, I buy that as a more likely explanation than racism. In fact, my guess would be that the CYA in this instance is an ADA trying to avoid "you don't care about the safety of our children" allegations, more so than them being worried about a school's budget (though I guess it's possible that they got the directive from higher ups).

The way I interpreted the summary is as follows: "Case A wasn't prosecuted, case B was. Case B was less deserving of prosecution than case A. One difference between the two cases is attribute R, which should not have any bearing on the decision to prosecute, but in practice often does (as is quite well documented). Hence, it is worth questioning whether this is one of the instances where attribute R is incorrectly used to decide matters regarding criminal justice".

That seems quite reasonable to me.

Funny, if you drop the quotes, instead of "creating a narrative", the BB gun story actually creates a narrative. Namely a narrative where an ADA is out for blood in one instance of possibly reckless behavior from a child that didn't cause anybody any harm, but ignored another instance of possibly reckless behavior from a child that resulted in the loss of life. Whether this has anything to do with race is of secondary importance. The primary issue is the apparent lack of consistency in the severity of prosecution from this ADA.

Not to get into a Bayesian vs. frequentist debate here, but note that this is not the only interpretation of probability out there. The frequentist interpretation is, in spirit, a statement "in hindsight". Troyusrex's point is that it's meaningless to talk about probabilities of things that are fixed quantities; the frequentist interpretation gets around that by making statements about quantities that have yet to be determined. So one only speaks of probabilities before an experiment has been performed and a measurement made. In practice of course we give things like p-values and confidence intervals based on actual observations, but we interpret all probabilities in terms of an infinite number of identical hypothetical experiments.

Seriously, instead of going after some of the truly egregious scams consumers face these days (pharma advertising, hello??), he picked a completely reasonable advertisement claim that you'd have to be a complete moron to misunderstand. Way to be on the little guy's side, Bob Ferguson.

Related -- the harmless and effective sleeping gases that Hollywood invented sadly do not exist. If they did, 130 people wouldn't have died here.

Yes, because it takes a lot of technical know-how to create a zip file and making it available as a torrent... /s

Perhaps: good at gliding => can use rising air columns from e.g. forest fires to stay in the air much longer.

Big data is the counterargument to AI-completeness, essentially it's the Chinese Room.

Could you possibly be confusing stigma with obscurity? I have never met anyone outside the tech world who had ever even heard the word Linux in their lives (that they could remember). Perhaps Google avoided it because every word in marketing is precious, and specifying a detail that won't help sales (even if it won't hurt, either) is a waste.

Well duh, the best thing is obviously to copy Apple in every way, and then take it to 11. Since MacOS does the "pinned popup" thing sometimes, it must be even better to do it all the time.

Dude, have you ever had any contact with a child?