Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Firearms identification wasn't my area* however I note that the tests were based on new firearms and the whole basis of marks examination is that an object which makes a mark picks up unique characteristics over the course of time so that an old object will leave a mark with more identifying characteristics than a new one.
It also concerns me that a lot of effort in these reports seems to have gone into the inconclusive responses. To my way of thinking there are only three possible responses to a comparison: they could match, they couldn't match and I can't draw a conclusion. The last shouldn't really affect the court's decision. Also, "could" and "couldn't" carry very different levels of confidence. If a particular blood sample couldn't have come from some particular person the court could reasonably decide it didn't. If it could that doesn't mean must have** and the court should take into consideration that it could also have come from many other people and should be provided with frequency figures to decide whether, in the particular circumstances of the case, that was likely.
But returning to this case - "thinking" the gun was responsible shouldn't be enough. Thinking isn't evidence and if that's all they were offering it suggests they didn't have evidence or even that they had evidence agianst them.
* Fortunately. One of the very few times I was asked to look at a firearm for some other purpose it turned out to have been booby-trapped. That was spotted by the colleague who examined it. A similarly booby-trapped forearm exploded and killed two police officers who'd opened it.
** I have experienced prosecution trying to drag "could have" on a hair sample into "must have". The FBI had a reputation for claiming great success in matching hair. I couldn't understand it because I never found it very conclusive. I later read that a proper investigation trashed that reputation. The only situation where I found hair examination could become conclusive was in the identification of three very badly burned bodies where a sample recovered from one was compared with samples from the hair brushes of the known victims and fortunately could only have come from one.
I have had a case which involved bite mark evidence to put a suspect at the scene although I didn't make the comparison - a dental expert did that. I wouldn't call it fringe except insofar as there are few cases where it's applicable. I'd also limit it to situations where the bite marks are of a quality comparable with those from tool marks or ballistics. That would exclude bite injuries on a victim.
"do people feel comfortable sharing their data, documents, and potentially sensitive information with a new entrant with a Chinese background?"
I suppose it depends on the attitudes of the people. As so many seem comfortable with sharing - or just haven't realised that's they are doing - such matters with companies with well-known backgrounds that show them to be predatory, then they may well. Those who aren't comfortable with the LLM status quo won't.
"modern solutions to phishing such as passkeys,"
Following the link to the previous article on passkeys I find "The website uses the stored public key to authenticate the user."
With scams the problem isn't the website authenticating the user, it's the user authenticating the website, emailer, caller or whatever. As another commentard said above, a one- email address per merchant helps with that. Not a complete solution but it's the starting point.
It would help greatly if is were made a criminal offence for companies to email links to login pages to customers. Any company that takes the security of its customers seriously would do that and emphasis to them that any email purporting to do so is a scam. I suppose the practical limitation to doing that voluntarily will be getting the message through to marketing. Once it's a criminal offence marketing can be told that the individual offender will carry the can.
"It's quite bizarre to pay for a copy of software that doesn't serve you, or even to run such even if you got a copy gratis."
You have utterly missed the point that OP has already paid for the software which does what they want and by choice wihes to continue using it.
You cannot rationally argue for freedom to choose by denying freedom to choose.
">my Linux laptop
That is a proprietary kernel, thus such laptop isn't yours."
WTF?????????
I'm guessing you're a recent convert to/discoverer of FOSS.
"That is the sunk cost fallacy in action and you are continuing to pay with your freedom."
Hold on there! Are you saying that in order to be free one shouldn't have the freedom to use the software of their choice where that includes S/W they have paid for.
Looking here at my Linux laptop there's certainly some GNU stuff in it. There's also stuff like KDE which certainly isn't GNU and without doing a full trace-back I don't know to what extent it relies on the GNU underpinnings - and I've better things to do with my time than find out. There are one or two bits and pieces which have been increasingly broken due to the underlying GTK stuff so the reliance on GNU could even be something of a liability.
But one thing I do know is that, GNU or not, they are all seen on the Linux kernel and not Hurd.
"...linked to Booking.com."
The use of booking.com and the like exactly the sort of thing for which automation would be useful - to open the mailbox address dedicated to it long enough for any transaction-related mail through and then slam it shut again. It's a chore but an essential one. Spam filtering will just waste excessive amounts of CPU power and some would still get through.
And, of course, here's a knock on effect with ticketed exhibitions. We made a trip to London - travel, hotels, etc. - for the Terracotta Army exhibition. As it was, the entry time was late night so if something like that had happened then the chances of getting a new time whilst we were there would have been negligible.
No doubt there were a good number of ticket holders who've also made a special trip and missed the event at the heart of it just because some pillock decides to commit professional suicide.
Being freelance really requires a professional approach to everything including the fact that the contract might be terminated at any time; an approach which was clearly lacking. But sometimes the permies just look at the money and think "I could do that" and make the jump when they really shouldn't.
"the amount of money being spent on this task force would pay for the hardware upgrade 5 times"
I was once stuck in a meeting where the item previous to mine was about when to replace some ancient ICL system. While sitting listen to them witter on I was musing about whether the electricity the beast would consume during the delay would cost more than the replacement.
I rather think they found themselves left with a site on which they'd had their previous development blocked (see my post above) and now wonder what to do with it. As any developer will tell you, a site with planning permission is more valuable than one without. Getting planning and selling it on is fairly common practice in the property industry and as DCs adjacent to the M 25 which is where the site happens to be, what better sort of permission could there be?
Back to the days of S100. The motherboard was just a row of sockets with traces between them and a place at the end to attach the PSU which had a whacking great electrolytic balanced on its screw-on terminals which I'm sure wasn't designed to be fixed like that.
Everything was plugged in.
That was even before Elonex.
