I think what Mr. Cahalan meant to right was > On the other hand, I cannot countenance 1 guilty murderer going free to > to protect 1 innocent [falsely accused of being a] parking scofflaw.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Crispin Cowan Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 2:35 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [FDE] on the proposed demise of the bill of rights Patrick Cahalan wrote: > On the other hand, I cannot countenance 1 guilty murderer going free to > protect 1 innocent parking scofflaw. > If they are actually innocent, then they are not scofflaws, eh? One big problem with convicting the innocent is that it is unjust. A worse problem is that it causes people to perceive the law as unjust, and then they stop caring about it, and commit much worse crimes. So if we allow the law to convict the innocent, we cause more lawlessness. OTOH, if we allow the law to let the guilty go free, we also cause lawlessness. I expect this is a dynamic optimization problem :) but I've said that before: "Timing the Application of Security Patches for Optimal Uptime". Steve Beattie, Seth Arnold, Crispin Cowan, Perry Wagle, Chris Wright, and Adam Shostack. Presented at the USENIX 16^th Systems Administration Conference (LISA 2002) <http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa02>, Philadelphia, PA, December 2002. Postscript <http://crispincowan.com/%7Ecrispin/time-to-patch-usenix-lisa02.ps.gz>. or ugly PDF <http://crispincowan.com/%7Ecrispin/time-to-patch-usenix-lisa02.pdf>. You get the same problem in intrusion detection systems, where if they are not sensitive enough, you miss intrusions, but if they are too sensitive, users ignore them. This problem occurs over and over when ever you have flaky sensors or imperfect knowledge. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Itanium. Vista. GPLv3. Complexity at work _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde
