Daniel_Newby

Indeed. That's why he was also protected by the FBI internal reviews that freed him, the prosecutors who know just how silly a bad fingerprint match will look in court, the compulsory defense lawyer and defense investigation budget, the judge with whom the admissibility of evidence is negotiated before trial, the trial judge, the more or less fairly selected jurors, the observers and free press in the trial courtroom, the appellate.

Please, please, stop wallowing in this idiotic paranoia or persecution fantasy or whatever it is. This guy looked suspicious as hell during a period of raving government paranoia, in a case involving a public safety emergency, and got interviewed for two weeks.

Yes, that is scary and obnoxious for him, but what more do you want? Investigate mad bombers slowly, carefully, like a stolen car case? Invest $500 billion to raise the false positive rate to one in 10 billion?

The article claims they deduced he was an international spy. But the article is a political hatchet job. It is entirely likely that "we put a lot of effort into investigating how he could have traveled" was ninja translated to "we knew he was flying under false papers".

His awareness was not used as evidence of guilt, silly. Not even that idiotic article said that. It was used as evidence that he was a flight risk.

Excellent means that they went from a tiny sliver of evidence to someone who raised pretty much every red flag there is.

And the excellent response was ... investigate harder. They did not drag him into a jail and torture a confession out of him, Japanese style. They did not torture him and his wife for anything they could get, Russian style. They did not disappear his entire family and business partners, Columbian style.

While waiting for the next few hundred people to be blown up, they ... investigated quietly. When the whole thing fell apart, they sent in a team of trained assassins to, well, actually there were no assassins or torture chambers, just a couple weeks in Club Fed as a material wotness. You know, like all the other witnesses locked up for a few days when they are trying to sort out who is the deranged killer and who can be safely released.

That's not very good, and that's horrifying as that could literally happen to any of us by nothing more than some bad luck.

Try reading my comment again, you fucking dumbass. EVERY DETECTION METHOD HAS A FALSE POSITIVE RATE, AND THE FBI'S FOR COUNTERTERRORISM APPEARS TO BE ABOUT 0.5 PER YEAR.

It could not "literally happen to any of us with a little bad luck". You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be struck by lightning. More people have won $100,000,000 in a lottery than have been held in non-criminal custody by the FBI due to investigation mistakes.

That's an error rate so low it would make jetliner engineers faint with envy. (You are orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by such an engineer than inconvenienced for a few days by the FBI.)

Stop regurgutating that idiotic political spew. Start thinking for yourself or shut the fuck up.

The FBI has no jurisdiction. Courts have jurisdiction.

A single partial fingerprint would have been laughed out of the prosecutor's office. If the prosecutor was idiotic or careless, the judge would have thrown it out. If by some reverse miracle the judge had believed it, the jury, defense lawyer, and expert witnesses would have stopped it.

There are dozens of layers of reviews and protections, not the ignorant "FBI has sole jurisdiction" theory you are spouting.

Honestly, have you never in you life watched a single episode of a police procedural TV show? Even an episode of Cops?

There is also the matter of the DNA that goes along with every fingerprint, which would have definitively exonerated the suspect.

The FBI was simply doing their job: vacuum up as much information as possible and look for patterns. Their only legal obligation to the suspect is to get search warrants before searching and not torture him. Period. Cops incriminate, the rest of the system sorts it out.

You want an investigator that analyzes the value of evidence and lays criminal charges too, you convene a grand jury. But not the FBI, not cops of any kind.

What, exactly, is terrifying? The FBI did an excellent job of making connections between suspicious facts, the sort of connections that should have been made to prevent the 9-11 attacks.

It is absurd to claim that this should not have happened. All detection methods have a false positive rate. Judging by what has shown up in the media, the FBI has a counterterrorism false positive rate of one person every few years. That is a stupendously low rate for such a rare yet politically-charged task.

Let's not forget their other famous false positive terrorism case: the anthrax case. Their needle in a haystack search turned up a false positive, but it also turned up the true positive.

The only terrifying thing here is that they suspected him of being a serial mass murderer, and then proceeded to apply such poor spycraft that a false positive was spooked. There are going to have a hard time catching real baddies being that sloppy.

Historically, collapsing banks simply collapse all at once. There is no incentive to slowly unveil a fraud. The depositors might kill you.

It's the money handling that is regulated, not the Bitcoins. You can trade Bitcoins for anything except money without any licensing (in the U.S.).

Apple wants out so people will not be carrying around irreplaceable wallets in their phones, then blaming Apple when they get robbed.

What I take from this story is that the financial law is so complex and unapproachable one can not reliably navigate it without landing in jail, even being a seasoned professional.

Because this story was written by a liar and/or idiot.

Option accounting law is simple and clear. Market value – exercise price = loss taken by shareholders. This goes in the quarterly report so the shareholders know how much they spent on employee compensation.

The financial planner "Michelle" was trying to simply not report the cost, to fraudently make the numbers look better. This is one of the oldest frauds in the book. Frankly I am amazed she did not get multiple life sentences for her crimes.

The story author falsely tried to make it look like some sort of terrifying subtlety, an accounting landmine that nearly blew off his leg. It is not. Every responsible accountant would start shitting kittens if confronted with this fraud in their company.

Edit: From other comments, the story was not even about the actual crimes. So the author is not an idiot, but manufacturing a scare story Daily Mail style.

No, and it does not matter who you trust. Analog circuitry simply has too much inbound and outbound information leakage to be trustworthy. You must round it out with a mixing algorithm.

That's madness or desperation. Sensible people ship bauxite as far as necessary to find cheap energy.

That aluminum paper was right.

Firstly, aluminum is originally made on-site at hydroelectric plants in inconvenient places. While it is energy intensive, nobody else is competing for that electricity. Cost = price of dam ÷ decades of aluminum production.

Secondly, aluminum recycles really well. Dumb machines can separate and purify it to high levels. The majority of aluminum has been recycled at least twice, amortizing the energy cost over a much larger amount of products.

Thirdly, aluminum is ductile (does not shatter) so containers can be made paper thin, and researchers are constantly devising ways to make it thinner. With recycling and thinness, the original production energy can be amortized over 10-100× more containers than an equal strength of glass.

Somewhere I read that such a call triggers a fraud red alert.

Are you serious? The U.S. has successfully fought wars in the recent past. High ranking officers are routinely sacked when they lose touch of soldiering and their mission fails. The U.S. version of party political indoctrination is just a little silliness like lesbian sensitivity training.

Planes do not have to be painted. Bare aluminum is pretty corrosion resistant. Many airlines strip most of the paint to save weight.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0741

http://www.thorium.at/?page_id=4

I could not find many references, but I think clocks mainly make the instrument cheaper, or possible in the case of long-baseline satellite instruments.

Gravity wave detectors get phase accuracy by comparing a photon to itself using an interferometer. SNR is improved by brightening the laser and averaging over more photons. The laser frequency is less important.

It turns out there are some ultraviolet nuclear transitions. The line widths promise to be obscenely narrow. If they can get it working in a clock, they will be able to directly measure gravitational time dilation of small masses.

Build several identical clocks and watch the ensemble drift relative to each other.

The lattice clock in this story has numerous clusters of atoms. They could fill only a few clusters and measure the performance relative to a good clock, then statistically derive how much it would improve by using the full set of clusters.

Indeed. The best existing atomic clocks need to be recalibrated if they are raised a few centimeters, owing to gravitational time dilation.

Psychiatric wards in the U.S. are for very short term stays by people who have extreme problems. They take people who are at major risk of causing harm, and patch them up just enough so that they can be thrown out. And even that is being scaled down and sped up.

The inpatient mental health system is like a mental ICU: designed for prevention of death, not for anyone's convenience.

Yale is a sort of a finishing school for the highest levels of electioneering. Having people leave to spend more time with their families is part of the game.

"Indolence from marijuana use increases the unpurchased goods overhanging the interstate market."

What you wrote was the public school history book version. X gave Y reasons to do Z. The details of what happened are important. The Great Depression was not aww shucks bad luck, it was a self-inflicted wound. Many of the fixes tried were also self-inflicted wounds.

The rhetoric is toned down. The present political situation is unstable, and unstable situations are ripe for demagogues to take power. I fear that the expanded interstate commerce clause is our Treaty of Versailles. If we do not build a country to be proud of, someone will slap a few runes and occult symbols on the Flag and say "Here is something to be proud of." And the crematoria will run night and day.

Indeed. The bitterest thing is that cheap access to space would have flowed forth a river of money to tech companies in every voting district. They could have sold uncancellable payloads like it was going out of style, and instead they crucified themselves on a single doomed political game.

Actually if you read the case, they say that growing the wheat was OK. Harvesting it was OK. Using it as fodder would have been OK. The unlawful act was threshing the wheat.

Ambrose Bierce was a sunny optimist.

Your comment omits one thing without which the reader cannot understand modern federal politics. At the same time automation was eliminating jobs at the highest rate in history, the federal government ran the money supply into the ground. This was the Great Depression.

When FDR became president, he took economic desperation as a blank check to do anything to fix the Great Depression. The federal government explicitly had no power over local manufacturing and employment, so they created the power by reinterpreting anything that hypothetically might affect later interstate commerce as if it were interstate commerce. So birthing too many piglets was the same thing as selling too much smoked pork across a state line, and the federal cops would come to your farm and correct it by killing the unlawful piglets.

This should probably have resulted in the rape of Washington, D.C., but at the time Americans were starving in Bangladesh-style tent cities and were willing to put up with a lot. Also local governments were flying the Communist flag and high federal officials were openly espousing Stalinism, so an unconventional jobs program that worked raised few eyebrows.

You basically have federal US laws outlawing anything having to do with marijuana, ...

On the theory that growing hemp in your garden is "interstate commerce". The laws are unconstitutional. It's all just vote whoring by the princes of Washington, D.C.

Decriminilazation is inevitable. It will take the form of a constitutional amendment, just like the one that stripped the feds of control of alcoholic beverages.

The Air Force hijacked the Space Shuttle design process and forced it to deliver gigantic loads to polar orbit (a very tricky task). Then they abandoned the Shuttle, leaving it misdesigned for a nonexistent mission.

Morton Thiokol is a solid rocket company in the northwestern U.S. The Shuttle launched from the southwest U.S. The solid rockets, with tubes of propellant inside, had to be cut into sections to make the long journey. The joints were heavy (very bad for rockets), and a leaky joint destroyed the Challenger.

The horrible Air Force requirements made refurbishing very expensive and slow. Everything had been stripped of so much weight that it was too fragile and needed detailed inspection and repairs for each launch.

Morton Thiokol was crammed into the program to get Shuttle votes from their state's senators. The catch is that the crammin-crap-in process doomed the program. But if Morton Thiokol had threatened to cancel the program unless it was reinvented, they could have come out as a real rocket company supporting a fleet that launched every month. Honestly, the innovations SpaceX is coming out with could and should have been done by the Shuttle program, instead of the idiot business "leaders" chaining themselves to the worst possible ideas

There are a lot of people who will vote for some regulation, and in Retardistan, D.C. that turns into total regulation to maximize the number of votes.

You know, like "health care seems kind of screwed up" turned into "put an excise tax on doing nothing" and "hire a contractor already famous for spectacular failure".

Or like "establish safety standards for children's poducts" turned in to "you cannot resell a children's produce without burning it and blessing the ash".

The American people get the government they deserve, and they get it good and hard.

A lot of things, like nonlinear control systems, can only be verified by Monte Carlo methods. Subsystem failure tolerance is difficult to handle by any existing theorem prover.

The JSF software organization uses static analyzers heavily. They are using theorem provers.