It's better to let a guilty man go free then to put an innocent man behind bars.

That may have a shred of truth, but it's not infinitely better.

One criminal not behind bars can kill 1000 or steal from thousands. One innocent person behind bars is 1 life diminished (but not extinguished).

And police can know for a fact that at least one of those two person's is guilty of something. So if the defendant is deemed guilty, among the suspects available to hold guilty of a crime, there are very very good odds.

The courts only have a certain success rate, and the number of people arrested in the US is large -- more than most other countries.

Therefore, the law of big numbers tells us essentially MANY innocent people will be erroneously placed behind bars for long periods of time, regardless of what we do, AND MANY guilty people will be erroneously allowed to go free, regardless of what we do. These are facts of life, which cannot be avoided, only accepted.

Both errors are grave. Arguably, having more criminals go free, increases the rate of crime on the streets.

It is on slashdot because it is a conservative victory, and this is a conservative web site. Any news that proclaims victory for conservatives - even if they are a loss for justice itself - automatically make the front page. Expect to see a front page story here when the Texas governor signs the latest anti-abortion bill as well.

This is not a conservative victory. This is the court doing its job to find the truth and making rulings on the law and the disposition of alleged criminals.

Either way, it would take months, if not years, before the guy saw any justice/money/compensation/etc. Unfortunately, no CxO in his/her right mind would even think of hiring the guy in the interim, given the toxicity of the events and who is backing the potential defendants

A CxO in their right mind would be able to hire the guy...it takes integrity to stand up to a superior for what's just and what's legal; understanding the risk that you might be fired for it.

Integrity, Intelligence, and Energy are the the most important characteristics to look for in a good employee, and Integrity is the hardest to find -- but the most important one.

I like transactional DDL; however, after an application is installed, DDL statements are extremely rare and in production: generally only allowed to be used by the DBA when applying a schema upgrade to support a new version of an application.

So in most cases transactional DDL isn't really an important factor.

California's not going anywhere for quite a while, and I doubt humans will exist by the time that happens, anyways, so to even consider it is funny.

The Earth's been around for billions of years, and will be around for billions of years more.

And humans are probably not going anywhere for quite awhile, but who could really say for certain? Noone.

CIA is launching the new GuantanaMoBrands Home Appliances

Well... the prisoners might as well be doing something useful, for all the money being spent to house them. Spending all 8 am to 6pm every day working at a Vacuum cleaner factory in GuantanaMo sounds great to me.

Why should these prisoners get to play all day, when the rest of the population has to work?

9/11 and that interview were clearly an amazing publicity stunt to generate hype for his vacuum cleaner design. Slashvertisement was just the next step in his plan.

Prisoners in general are held to be in the service to the government, while in prison --- so, as if they were an employee, the government gets the rights to their creation, invention, or business.

So if there was a publicity stunt involved, the guy should have designed it first.

followed by a fair and impartial trial, was the most effective way to ensure that an admission of guilt (or conviction) was credible and final.

And then they went and screwed it up, by letting interrogators lie -- imply that they had enough evidence to put 'em away for life, and coax the prisoner into confessing under a false pretense that they'll get off with less prison time, than they'd be certain to have if they insisted upon exercising their right to a trial.

If they are managing a big project that has software costs of millions a year then they must be very important.

That's insane.... if the NPV of the project is higher, then it's clearly a more important project.

Spending more on software lowers the NPV: unless the software adds more value than less-costly options.

On the other hand... a project where much more is spent, but destroys value is not an important project --- it needs to be optimized by reducing costs or scrapped.

I'm pretty sure companies' management understand value, and how to evaluate whether a project is improving value for the company better than another project, or whether a project is destroying value and needs to get cancelled or have its team size and costs cut in half.

The companies' whose management don't understand are failing or only succeeding by coincidence in spite of incompetence, and are doomed to failure eventually, assuming management doesn't get replaced with a competing more effective management.....

There are features Oracle provides that have no PostgreSQL equivalent.

• Price -- it costs a lot of money. For many governmental entities, this is a huge advantage -- as they are given a budget, and they need to spend it, otherwise their budget will get reduced -- if its an excuse to spend money, based on claims of productivity, they will often deny requests to use OSS, and mandate the use of Oracle, based on its productivity-improving and more-reliable qualities that some slick salesman persuaded them of, after taking them out for steak at a 5-star restaurant somewhere, or whatever. Also; I hear plenty of government workers saying Management has a no open source software policy; for security reasons, the more money spent on the product the better, as closed source code is deemed to be more secure... For me, and business i'm involved with, this is a huge negative for Oracle, and a reason I almost always pick Postgresql; yes, Oracle delivers more, BUT in many cases you pay Oracle for every extra cent of additional incremental value Oracle delivers over Postgres, and maybe 300% more.
• RAS features -- such as clustering Oracle RAC
• Development productivity tools such as - Pro*C
• SQL Language features where Oracle's implementation is superior -- such as BLOBs. Postgres manages these poorly, for example, you cannot reliably pg_dump blobs - if your application is BLOB happy (e.g. Sharepoint-like), then Postgres is not very suitable.
• SQL Language features that have no PostgreSQL analog -- such as CONNECT BY clauses, Java class based schema and table mappings; module languages; XML types; default value funciton parameters; organize stored procedure objects using packages; .

Would it relieve you to know that there exist people whose opinions have been swayed by the revelation of scientific study on the subject. I didn't think earthquakes were a likely result of fracking before, but I do now. Sucks that I was wrong before.

Before I can jump to that conclusion.... I have to raise a serious question, however: Have their results been repeated?

Under ordinary circumstances, I would lend a great deal of credence to research --- BUT, there is a serious problem. I know for a fact that there are already environmental groups who are very vocal in their opposition to fracking.

They already speculated the conclusion that fracking can cause earthquakes. And there are probably millions or billions of money to be spent under the table: by activists and lawyers interested in the potential opportunities, for researchers willing to see things the way they do.

My concern is that the outcome of the research may have been affected by known or unknown biases that caused their results to be distorted and not in line with reality.

Therefore; I would demand that their results are reproduced and audited, before they deserve any credence. For the time being, I say their findings are troubling, but a great degree of skepticism is called for.

How about you evaluate for yourself whether the removal millions of gallons of liquid from the earth's crust leaves cavities which result in compression which result in stress which result in earthquakes in geological stable regions.

We remove millions of gallons of liquid from the earth's crust to create drinking water. Without removing those millions of gallons of liquid -- there is no water for humans to drink, and there are massive die-offs of humans....

Where have I heard that? "The earth isn't warming" to "Ok it's warming but that's a good thing" or "Evolution doesn't happen" to "Ok micro-evolution happens".

Ok, they were wrong at first, but they advanced the science in the most rational way; without taking a pessimistic bias and prematurely assuming that the worst possible things are the case.

but it's equally unwise to think you're safe as long as no one pokes it. The important problem is the pile of explosives!

You may be a lot safer if noone pokes it with a stick. The pile of explosives could sit safely by for thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of years if unmolested.

Given sufficient amounts of time major geological disturbances are guaranteed

For example; continental drift. California separating from the mainland; Japan getting sucked down into the ocean.

Accelerating geologic scale events is called a catastrophe.

All that energy will be released eventually, it's just a question of when - and the longer it takes to snap, the worse it will be.

If it happens today; It could seriously hurt me. If it happens 200 years from now but is 5 times worse, then maybe I don't care.

So happening sooner is not always better

A quake today is more damaging than a quake years from now.