Here’s a test of the High HDR effect on the Camera360 app for Android. Not bad.
I think it’s a testament to our justice system that the jury in the Casey Anthony trial relied on the (lack of) evidence, and not the emotional appeal of the case or the prosecutor’s rebuttal, to render their verdict. Anthony may very well have killed her daughter, but the legal system has standards of evidence that were not met in this case.
Of course, the justice system is imperfect, because human decision making is imperfect and operates on incomplete information, especially when trying to reconstruct events from the past. So, errors happen.
It’s a classic sensitivity vs specificity problem. Juries make both Type I and Type II errors, and there’s an inevitable trade off between the two. As you reduce one type of error, you increase the other. You can relax your standards and convict more real criminals, but you’ll also falsely convict more innocent people as a result. This was the way juries erred in the past, and 138 death row inmates have been exonerated from false murder convictions in the United States over the last 40 years. These days, we have improved forensics and higher standards of evidence, and the justice system errs on the side of caution — as it should — so people like Casey Anthony will occasionally go free, but we’ll also send fewer innocent people to their deaths.
Given that both types of error occur, it’s interesting how the public only goes into fits of rage over the false negatives. What about someone who gets falsely convicted of murder and spends years or decades in prison before being exonerated? There’s a life wasted by 12 fools in a court room. Where’s the outrage over that? And what about the innocent people who have probably been murdered by juries? Sure, not a single wrongful execution has been positively identified in the United States, but only because judges universally refuse to reopen the cases. They know a single proven case would end capital punishment in America. However, plenty of questionable cases exist. Where’s the outrage over that?
I’m not saying one is more important than the other. I’m just acknowledging that both types of error occur. It’s everyone else who seems to only rage over the false negatives.
The MPAA claims that piracy costs the entertainment industry 375,000 jobs and $16 billion in revenue every year. This estimate is misleading because it appears to be based on the assumption that every person who pirates content would have purchased that content otherwise. It should be obvious why that assumption is wrong. The cheaper you make something, the more people will buy it, and if you make it free, even more will take it. We witnessed this phenomenon recently when the new Lady Gaga album sold on Amazon.com for 99 cents and the volume of purchases crashed their servers. I guarantee you most of those people would not have purchased the album if it cost $10 (myself included).
Ironically, while the MPAA is making these claims, the movie industry is making record profits in things like theater ticket sales. Sure, DVD sales are down, but (legal) online streaming is way up. So, I don’t see how they are losing 375,000 jobs, but even if they are, there is no way to know how many of those jobs were lost to piracy, because there is no direct one-to-one correspondence between pirated downloads and lost sales.
The vast majority of people who pirate content would not have purchased it otherwise, and the people who always planned to purchase it, did. That is why, somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, massive piracy is probably only marginally harming the entertainment industry.
Glenn Greenwald, on the Bank of America, HB Gary, Palantir, WikiLeaks, Anonymous affair:
But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power. I’ve written many times about this issue — the full-scale merger between public and private spheres – because it’s easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It’s not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it’s worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.
That’s what this anti-WikiLeaks campaign is generally: it’s a concerted, unified effort between government and the most powerful entities in the private sector (Bank of America is the largest bank in the nation). The firms the Bank has hired (such as Booz Allen) are suffused with the highest level former defense and intelligence officials, while these other outside firms (including Hunton & Williams and Palantir) are extremely well-connected to the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government’s obsession with destroying WikiLeaks has been well-documented. And because the U.S. Government is free to break the law without any constraints, oversight or accountability, so, too, are its “private partners” able to act lawlessly. That was the lesson of the Congressional vesting of full retroactive immunity on lawbreaking telecoms, of the refusal to prosecute any of the important Wall Street criminals who caused the 2008 financial crisis, and of the instinctive efforts of the political class to protect defrauding mortgage banks.
The exemption from the rule of law has been fully transferred from the highest level political elites to their counterparts in the private sector. “Law” is something used to restrain ordinary Americans and especially those who oppose this consortium of government and corporate power, but it manifestly does not apply to restrain these elites.
That the primary purpose of American government is to protect the interests of large corporations and privileged elites is something that we “liberals” have been saying for years. It has only become blatantly obvious in the age of WikiLeaks, and demonstrates a thousand fold the necessity of whistle blowing organizations.
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.
…
“Basically, this is a brief soundbite,” the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. “The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on,” she or he will continue.
…
This paragraph will explain that while some scientists believe one thing to be true, other people believe another, different thing to be true.
In this paragraph I will provide balance with a quote from another scientist in the field. Since I picked their name at random from a Google search, and since the research probably hasn’t even been published yet for them to see it, their response to my e-mail will be bland and non-committal.
“The research is useful”, they will say, “and gives us new information. However, we need more research before we can say if the conclusions are correct, so I would advise caution for now.”