Rov_Scam
13hr ago
Right now they don't have to work any angle since he's only charged with manslaughter.
Rov_Scam
19hr ago
The reporting I saw suggests that there is video, but that the police aren't releasing it. The video is supposedly how the police determined that the bullet ricocheted off of the headrest before hitting the driver.
Rov_Scam
19hr ago
A jury can reasonably infer that someone who shoots at someone and kills them had the requisite intent to do so. Just because the defendant says otherwise doesn't mean that the prosecution has to come up with an alternate theory of the case. The jury isn't required to believe the defendant.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
The canonical example is a spouse walking in on an act of adultery and killing one of the parties. Some states require that the act be illegal. So something like finding out your son's baseball coach was molesting him or that your employee drained the company funds to finance a gambling spree might qualify. Some states have held that it's a sort of modified version of the battered wife defense, where long-term domestic abuse would count as sufficient provocation to reduce the charges to manslaughter if the provocation weren't severe enough to be justifiable self-defense. In the same vein, some states allow manslaughter in the case of incomplete self-defense, where the defendant genuinely but unreasonably feared for his life. Mutual combat would be another example, where the perpetrator develops the intent to kill during the course of the fight. I would also add that the killing has to take place before the perpetrator has time to reflect on his actions. If the coach admits he's been abusing your son and your immediate reaction is to beat him to death, that's a better case than if you drove to his house armed after your son told you he'd been abused. But, like I said, it's reserved for unusual cases where a juror would say "I understand that as a society we can't allow people to get away with this, but I understand why the guy would have gone to those extremes". It's not for cases—like getting dumped, or fired, or cut off in traffic—that normal people experience on a regular basis without getting the urge to kill.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
I hate to be cynical, but it honestly looks like they're trying to go easy on a retired cop. Some journalists have noted that the police haven't provided a photo of the alleged perpetrator, and that he was whisked in and out of the courthouse through the back door. Additionally, his entire online profile appears to have been scrubbed before his name was made public. A defense attorney interviewed by the New York Post suggests that it's because they couldn't prove depraved indifference, which, if firing a gun into a moving vehicle on a crowded highway doesn't count, I'm not sure what does. The recklessness argument is irrelevant anyway, since if that were the case he'd be charged with Second Degree Manslaughter, not First Degree.
The whole "extreme emotional disturbance" argument that's available in New York does offer another possibility, though it would be heavily dependent on the facts. For instance, if the guy owned a failing business and was having trouble sleeping over it and was on his way back from a meeting where the deal he thought would save the company fell through and now he has to tell his wife, who is already suggesting they get a divorce since he left his good job at the foundry to pursue a hare-brained business venture, that the bank was probably going to foreclose on their house and they'd have to pull the kids out of college, and he found himself in the parking lot of the Harrisburg Coat Outlet three hours after the shooting with no idea how he got there and no recollection of the incident, the event might qualify as an extreme emotional disturbance under New York law. The whole thing sounds to me like a "don't call it an insanity defense", and like temporary insanity defenses, it seems unlikely a jury would buy it. Unlikely enough, at least, that as a prosecutor I'd at least make them argue it as a defense at trial and wouldn't automatically reduce the charges.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
See my above comment, but road rage is very much not the definition of manslaughter. Manslaughter requires an unusual emotional disturbance predicated on an amount of provocation that would cause an ordinary person to snap. There was a road rage killing in Pittsburgh this summer where a guy got out of his car and shot a guy who didn't pull all the way up to the stop line at a red light. This isn't the kind of thing where we say "Oh yeah, I totally understand why he would have flown off the handle and killed someone".
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
By the way, I am not familiar with the New York law of homicide, but I am aware that in general there is a principle called the "depraved heart" doctrine. The idea is that some acts are so reckless that they will imply the necessary intent for murder even in the absence of premeditation or deliberation. The classic example of this is discharging a firearm into a building which is known by the shooter to be occupied. So it seems like there is a basis here to charge the (alleged) shooter with murder even if it was just a spontaneous road rage incident.
The basis for charging murder would be that he shot at a guy and killed him. If he thought the GW Bridge would be a good place to get some target practice in, then one could make the case for depraved heart murder. When you actively aim at someone you intend to hit, and hit them, the prosecution doesn't need to show evidence of recklessness.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
That he fired in a "moment of emotion" isn't enough to reduce the charges from murder to manslaughter. If it were, then "I was pissed off" would be a partial defense to murder, and that's ridiculous. The test in most states is that the victim provoked the defendant to such a degree that a reasonable person would be expected to lose their composure and self-control. The canonical example is the husband who walks in on his wife's infidelity, but more typical examples would be a wife responding to years of abuse, someone learning that the victim molested their child, the victim making threats, the victim brandishing a firearm, etc. Some states explicitly require that the provoking action be illegal, or otherwise meet a series of onerous requirements. New York's statute is actually more expansive than the majority of states, in that it creates its own "extreme emotional disturbance" test rather than rely on the traditional common law definition, but it's unclear if this has any practical effect. What is clear is that the emotional disturbance has to be of an unusual nature, and not simply a response to the normal irritations of daily life.
When you look at this case, the provocation was being cut off in traffic, or "nearly getting into an accident" to use the phrasing of the defense. There are over 600 traffic accidents in New York City every day. Almost everyone who has been a licensed driver for any amount of time has nearly gotten into a dozen accidents that were avoided. I don't know exactly what happened, but based on the setup of the ramps my guess is that where two lanes were merging into one as the ramp merged onto the bridge Mr. Irving, being in the lane that was ending, sped up and cut off Mr. Romero as he merged over. As a resident of a city where it's not uncommon to have to cut across five lanes of traffic multiple times just to stay on the same road, I am familiar with the frustrations that can come from either end of the transaction, but it's hard to see any circumstance where I'd sympathize with someone whose response is to chase down the car and start shooting into it while it was moving. Even if Romero was a hair away from slamming into Irving's rear bumper, this is not the kind of experience likely to result in extreme emotional disturbance. For most people, a honk of the horn and a few choice words would be the end of it, and it wouldn't even be remarkable enough to comment on at dinner.
Romero shot at a guy and killed him. It's about as clear-cut a case of murder as one can expect. Premeditated murder would be a stretch, but he did tailgate him for a while before rolling up alongside of him and shooting, and prosecutors have successfully charged premeditation based on a lot less. (Courts have ruled that a few seconds premeditation is enough, though I disagree with this as a matter of principle and believe that the present shooting is a clear example of non-premeditated murder.) The fact that it was a longshot is irrelevant. This isn't a case of recklessness. He wasn't trying to hit a deer that jumped on an embankment and ended up hitting a driver; he was specifically aiming for Irving, and that it wasn't a high-probability shot isn't a mitigating circumstance.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I agree both are borderline, but Goff was run out of town after one bad year, and he's led a top-5 offense since the Lions got their shit together. I'm not quite as hot on Purdy, but he's never been in a situation where the 49ers have questioned their choice to roll with him. The point is that I'd rather have him under center than Jordan Love, Sam Darnold, or Trevor Lawrence, and it's not even close. Comparing him with Roethlisberger and Rivers isn't appropriate because both of them played in the high-flying 2010s. Ben put up big numbers during the Killer Bs era, but he was generally the kind of guy who would put up his biggest numbers in seasons when the team was mediocre and he had to pass a lot. During the Killer Bs era he usually hung around the lower end of the top ten in passing yards and his first two years he didn't crack the top twenty, including his first Super Bowl year. Rivers put up bigger numbers but is widely regarded as worse. This isn't to rag on either of them, just to demonstrate that I'm not looking at raw numbers here to make my determinations. You have to account for the era, and Ben and Phil played in an era when QBs put up the biggest numbers. Joe Montana never had a 4,000 yard season, while Matt Schaub had 3. Who would you rather have as your QB?
As for Mahomes, it's the same deal. The guy isn't putting up the fantasy numbers he used to; so what? Would you rather have Bryce Young as your quarterback? Rashee Rice has been out the past 2 games, Kelce isn't what he used to be, and they finally have a reliable running back. Andy Reid isn't trying to rack up fantasy points for Patrick, he's trying to win games, and the Chiefs are 5–0. What games has Mahomes played poorly in?
Rov_Scam
3d ago
It was only money in the sense that his value to other teams was more than it was to the Chiefs. The Bucs completely shut him down in the Super Bowl, and the following season his numbers were still up but he wasn't getting the big plays he used to get. If he were as critical to their success as he was in 2019, they would have found a way to keep him, and Mahomes's contract is one of the most team-friendly in the league considering he was arguably the best QB in the league when he signed. It's also worth keeping in mind that they traded him. Yes, it was clear that he wasn't going to sign long-term, but if they thought he was critical to their success they would have let him play out his contract and take the compensatory draft pick.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Any longpoast trying to explain why nobody wants it, is simply resting on a false premise.
Google Docs apparently has 1 billion active users against 750 million for Microsoft Office. Yet, the same source says that there are only 6 million paid Google Workspace users. This is a conversion rate of 0.6%, compared to Microsoft's conversion rate of 100%, since they don't offer a free product, on 75% of Google's total user base. To put it another way, there are about 125 times as many paid Office users as paid Docs users. Also keep in mind that I would be included among those 1 billion users because there are still things I use it for, just not as a substitute for Office. But I wouldn't pay for the product, and evidently the vast majority of people are with me on that.
And that's the entire point. People have proven time and again that they aren't willing to pay for a stripped down product. The fact that they use it if given it for free is irrelevant.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I'm not sure what liability you think software companies are assuming, and I say this as a product liability attorney.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I comment more extensively above, but Microsoft Works was a thing. And nobody bought it, because nobody wants to miss out on functionality. Google Docs has its fans, but I tried to rely on it for work (nay, a company I was contracted to wanted everyone to work in active shared documents so if work had to be reassigned someone else could jump right in) and it was brutal. I ended up just doing all my work in Office and uploading it as a Google Doc to turn it in.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
To give a more complete answer, a lot of these products used to exist, but were slowly discontinued, not because of some grand conspiracy to make people pay more but because they didn't sell. Probably the best example was Photoshop Elements. Yes, you could d a lot with Photoshop but yes, it was expensive software designed for the professional market. So Adobe came out with a stripped-down version designed for consumers. It didn't sell, and wasn't widely adopted despite being bundled with a number of consumer-grade digital cameras. The reason it didn't sell well is that if you advertise something as lacking features, the consumer feels like they're missing out on something. And usually they are. Every digital photography handbook out there talked about curves and how useful they were. Elements, however did not have this feature. Why? Well, there are other ways to adjust contrast and the like that will get you 80% of the way there, which should be good enough for most people, and they need to keep something exclusive to the full version. Sure, the average user may only need 15% of the features, but it's a different 15% for each user, and if you distill a product to only the basic features that everyone uses, you get a product that doesn't work for anybody but the most basic user.
The one suggestion I've seen to combat this has been to make the software modular, so that you download a version with basic functionality but can install modules for more advanced features. This doesn't work either. In the late 2000s iTunes was the king of the digital media players but was starting to get slow and bloated. The best free alternatives were MediaMonkey (which had the best kind of paid tier—not essential but absolutely worth the modest cost) and MusicBee, both of which realized that the marketing features and store were to blame; they got rid of this crap but otherwise offered products with even more features than iTunes. Winamp, with its totally stripped-down nature, predated iTunes and had widespread adoption. After it was formally discontinued, it was ressurected as Foobar, which kept the bare-bones functionality but offered a modular design so that more advanced users could expand functionality. I tried using this, mainly because it seemed to be what all the cool kids were doing. The problem I had was that it was a pain in the ass figuring out what modules I needed and then installing them. Want to do x? Download a plug-in and get it to work. Repeat 50 times. And this was with a piece of free software; imagine having to pay for each of these modules. Elements doesn't come with curves, but you can download a module for $30, or get it for an additional $2/month added on to your subscription. Repeat 50x. Suddenly full version looks like a good deal, and the modular version looks set up to nickle and dime consumers.
Of the three possibilities, living with the bloat is the one that makes the most sense. Look at the developer forums for any popular open-source software and they're loaded with feature requests. I don't see anyone responding that the software is perfect and don't add anything to increase bloat. Or keep everything as a separate plug-in because I like the version of Gimp that only lets me adjust tone and contrast and I don't want it bloated with your stupid curves and brushes.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
The "somewhere" is increasingly "somebody else's computer". With how much software companies are pushing web-based cloud models that don't run anything locally, I don't see why this would be a problem.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
There was an HD logo in the corner of the screen that would light up when it was in digital. Tapping it turned it on or off.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
I can answer this question for you and @SkoomaDentist. The same thing to me happened about a decade ago. It seemed to always happen during Pirates games; it was noticeable because I'd be sort of listening and would be struck by the fact that the announcers just said the same thing they had already said, like the broadcast was jumping back in time. I eventually figured out the culprit: HD Radio. This car was from 2012 so it was an earlier implementation that didn't have any buffering. The way it worked was that the station had both an analog and digital signal. The digital signal was preferred because there was less static, but it was weaker and prone to interference. When ever the digital signal would go out, it would automatically switch to analog until the signal was strong enough, at which point it would switch back to digital. The problem was that the digital signal was a few seconds behind the analog signal, so every time it switched back over to digital it would be like hitting the rewind button. I could manually switch the radio to stay in analog all the time, and I noticed that I could replicate the effect by switching back and forth while I was in digital range. The reason I didn't notice it in the other direction was because I wasn't paying close enough attention and if it jumped forward it would be new material that I hadn't heard yet. The car I have now only uses the analog signal if available and the digital substations take a few seconds to buffer before I'll get sound.
I'm guessing that what you heard was the digital signal dropping out and switching back to analog. If the radio is ancient it might not have a sufficient buffer.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Software is protected by copyright, not patent, which means that while the term is longer, the protections aren't as strong. Copyright doesn't cover the software itself but the source code, which means you could develop a program with identical functionality to an existing program as long as you use different code. What this means in practice, however, is that you have to develop the product independent of the existing product, i.e. you can't just take the existing code base and make superficial changes. Courts generally require that the code itself be developed entirely independently. All the programs you listed (Gimp especially) aren't even clones of existing products, just products with similar functionality. Gimp wasn't developed by someone taking Photoshop's code base and modifying it. If what the AI is doing is taking the existing product and reverse-engineering or reverse-compiling or whatever it is to figure out what the code is, then as far as the law is concerned it's no different than if they copied and pasted the executable file. And no, it's not a strong defense that their versions don't have the account control features that verify that the user is a paying customer.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
It was bound to happen. If vibecoding is so easy that software companies can dump all their programmers, then why do we need software companies to begin with? For that matter, why do we need software? If ChatGTP can generate complex code off of vibes, then certainly it can manage spreadsheet functions on its own, or obviate the need for Photoshop (see me comment below), or do whatever SalesForce does, or run engineering simulations, or anything else you want software to do except maybe play games.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
You're hopelessly naive if you think that these clubs have anything but a vague historical connection to the ethnicities they represent, or that the members would admit a black person if they weren't forced to. If you think the governor of the German Club is going to be impressed by a black guy speaking German, there's about a 0% chance he speaks German and a 50% chance he doesn't have a drop of German blood in him. Of course, none of this matters, because he's not getting served to begin with, and if he were ever interested in membership, the humiliation of getting kicked out wouldn't convince him that these are people he wants to hang out with. The same was true for a different local club that I forgot to mention earlier, that had a swimming pool that notoriously didn't allow blacks to the point that kids would have birthday parties there and be specifically told not to invite any black friends. This was 30 years ago and the club has since closed, though it was pretty explicitly segregated well into the 90s at minimum. Hell, my dad was a member of a whites-only sportsmen's club, though it's my understanding that they've since adopted a nondiscrimination policy.
The clubs I know that are still segregated get away with it because they're otherwise pillars of the community, and incidents haven't made the news. The police certainly know what is going on, and will give them special privileges wrt DUIs and the like, and will remove an uppity black person who refuses to leave. They won't specifically cite any whites-only policy, only that it's a private club and they have a right to refuse service to anyone, and that any discrimination claims are a civil matter. Not that a civil case would be successful, since private clubs aren't subject to the civil rights act as they aren't open to the public (the particular clubs in question have restrictive enough membership that it's not like an American Legion where if you ring the buzzer and want to join someone will sponsor you as long as you don't seem like a troublemaker; they only admit new members once a year, and it's difficult to get in even if you're white). I don't even think that the members are particularly racist; like I said they're just older and protective of what tradition they have, even if that tradition sucks.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
You're reading too much into this; any time a player rejects their team, they're going to get booed when they come back. There was speculation that he was unhappy stemming back to last winter, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy when he couldn't tune it out. After he told them he wouldn't be resigning with the team under any circumstances it was over for him, and the no-trade clause meant that he was able to force a trade to the Panthers. So the team was left in a bind—either keep him around for two years while his lack of commitment is known and might affect his play and infect the dressing room, or trade him for less than market value. It was a lose-lose proposition, and the fans have a right to be pissed. Jaromir Jagr got booed in Pittsburgh on two occasions, a decade apart, for a lot less. The first time was when they traded him to Washington for scratch-off lottery tickets because they legitimately couldn't afford his contract (commentary that suggesting this was a bad trade ignores the fact that every team knew Pittsburgh's hand was forced and could thus name their price). The second time was when he came back to the NHL in 2011 and signed with Philadelphia for more money than Pittsburgh was able to offer. Yes, the Pens made him a fair offer, but the Flyers were willing to overpay by a lot, and the Pens didn't have the cap space to match. The fact that Jagr acted like an entitled brat his last few years with the Pens didn't help, but his reasons for leaving/not returning were justified. Barry Bonds similarly got booed in 1993 for the sin of signing an outrageous (by 1993) standards contract with the Giants. And this is after everyone knew that the Bucs were in dire financial straits and had no hope of signing him.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
If I ever get the time (a big if), I'd like to install the clone on a VM and see how it compares. I say this as someone who pays for Photoshop, but who isn't a graphic designer or using it for anything work-related. The problem with a lot of this testing is that, even if you do have the full version of Photoshop for comparison, the relative quality isn't going to be apparent from testing alone. You actually have to rely on the thing in question for some time and see how it goes, and see how the frustrations build. To give an example, ChatGTP's image generation is actually fairly good at doing things that Photoshop can't, notably upscaling low-resolution images. The first few times I tried it, the results were impressive, and I started making it part of my PS workflow for stubborn images that would take too long to edit the traditional way. The problem (if you can call it that) is that it only works about half the time, and that's being generous. It's not merely editing the image but generating an entirely new one based on what it thinks the old one should look like. When it gets that wrong, which is often, it generates something that is not only an incorrect representation but one that can't easily be rectified in Photoshop. It also works better if the images are in good shape going in, so there's a lot of preprocessing involved.
The upshot is that, a not insignificant percentage of the time, AI actually increases the amount of work involved. To be clear, I'm using this primarily to edit album covers for which clean versions don't exist, and the work involved can range from minor editing of a decent-sized image to working magic so a small, poorly taken one looks presentable, to completely reconstructing an image from scratch using the original as a guide. I now need to add a brief extra step of deciding whether it's worth attempting to use AI. Then I need to find an image to use, and prepare it. The extra work involved comes from the fact that the best image to use for an AI reconstruction isn't necessarily the easiest one to edit manually. I would also add that even successful AI generations have a tendency to oversaturate the colors or otherwise screw them up, so there's an extra step of loading the finished image into Photoshop and dialing things back (I have to do this anyway because ChatGTP generates 1200×1200 images and I want 1000×1000). When it works well, the results are nonpareil. But getting it to work well means doing 75% of the work for a 50/50 shot at something usable. It isn't so much a time-saver as it is an overall value-add.
The whole experience kind of sums up my opinion of AI workflows in general and why I'm not convinced that it will dent employment in any significant numbers. It seems impressive when you first use it, but when you actually try to implement it, it doesn't produce results with the consistency one can expect from doing the work manually. Yes, humans make mistakes and do shoddy work to, but humans screw up in predictable ways. The mistakes AI makes aren't ones that humans typically make. For example, people talk about AI use in my own field, law, as though it could eliminate 90% of our work. Aside from the fact that people who say this don't seem to have much of an idea about what lawyers actually do, the well-publicized boo-boos of lawyers submitting filings to the court that contain hallucinated cases that happen to perfectly fit with the case at hand aren't the kinds of mistakes lawyers typically make. In fact, if I fabricated a case in a motion because my argument was a loser or there wasn't anything on-point, I'd be sanctioned by the judge and fired from my job. Even if a first-year attorney submitted something to me for review, I'd assume from the outset that the cases he cites are real and that he's not misrepresenting them. Having to fact check every citation does not cut down on the amount of work involved. It may mitigate it somewhat, but that assumes that we're drafting from scratch; most motions I file are similar to ones that I've filed before, and I'm not going to reinvent the wheel every time I need to file one. AI drafting could theoretically give me scaffolding from which to work, but even then I can probably find a motion someone else has filed if I'm looking for a bare template. And that doesn't even get to the problem that I need to be prepared to argue the motion and am thus going to have to do the research equivalent anyway. So AI may shave some time off of drafting motions if I need to draft something I haven't done before, and even then it's not like I spend a ton of time drafting motions to begin with.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
It's on the record that he jumped bail, moved to Pennsylvania, and spent the next several years moving around to duck extradition warrants. I'm just pointing out what the attorney can and can't say regarding that kind of advice, and I doubt his attorney actually gave that advice.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
If the lawyer advised her to skip bail and hope the DA would give up and drop the charges, then yes, that would be unethical. If the conditions of the defendant's bond were such that precluded him from leaving the county, or state, or other geographic area, then yes, it would be unethical. If it were merely advice that they needed to leave the town and not draw any attention to themselves, and none of this violated any conditions set forth by the court, then it wouldn't be unethical. It's usually good advice for someone involved in a legal dispute, whether civil or criminal, to keep their mouth shut and avoid being the center of attention. If, for example, you're sued for a car crash and you think the Plaintiff's injury claims are bullshit, don't go on social media saying as much and putting forth your version of what actually happened. Any public statements you make about a dispute will be entered into evidence, and you'll be questioned about them, and if there are any inconsistencies with sworn testimony, it calls your credibility into question.
Proof beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't require direct evidence. If the jury hears that Irving cut him off, he tailgated the guy for a period of time, pulled up alongside him, and fired a gun into his car, they can infer from the circumstances that he intended to hit him. Romero can argue otherwise, but the jury doesn't have to believe him. If Romero did make that argument, then yes, the prosecution could counter that it was depraved indifference murder because if firing a gun into a moving vehicle on a busy highway doesn't create a grave risk of death, then it's hard to argue what does, but the defense isn't going to make that argument for precisely that reason.
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