a) It's cheaper to incarcerate people than it is to kill them: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29552692/ns/us_news-crime_and_co...
b) Sometimes, our judicial system gets it wrong. Wikipedia counts about 140 exonerated death row inmates over the past forty years in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_in...
EDIT: that is not to say that blindly relying on open source software is any better. From my point of view the ideal would be both the use of peer-reviewed software AND requirements to manually double- and triple check the results produced by said software.
When we lock someone away for the rest of their life, we don't devote much effort to getting things right. When we decide to execute someone, we are very careful about making sure we got the right guy. It's likely that at least some of your 140 exonerated death row inmates would still be in jail today if they were sentenced to life in prison.
If the criminal justice system is broken, we need to fix it. Eliminating the death penalty won't fix it, it will just make the media talk about something else.
How does that work? I mean, how do you examine what must basically be a log file (though perhaps in some binary format), come up with 84 hits but then realize it was only 1 hit and blame the problem on file complexity? Seems like such an issue would only result in underreporting, not overreporting. Where did the 84 number even come from?
If that is truly what happened, the fix is to simply re-initialize the visitedcount to 1 between rows in case there isn't a visitedcount listed.
However (from your link):
"It is a plain text format which is not easily human readable and is not efficient in its storage structures. For example, a single Unicode character can take many bytes to store."
My faith in the competency of "digital detectives" is not fully restored...
Hopefully this is just another case of someone simplifying things to increase readability to a mainstream audience, but every time I read something like that related to CS/programming/IT I cringe in horror at all of the things I must have a horribly half-assed understanding of by not being an expert in that field and building what little knowledge I have on the subject from articles like these.
$ grep 12.34.56.78 logfile | wc -l
84
Because it was presented to the jury during the trial.
The jury was told that the number of visits to that site was transposed with the number of visits to myspace. A prosecution witness cleared the record in open trial.
In fact, defense attorney Jose Baez even brought up the fact during closing arguments and used it as a reason to have reasonable doubt of the entire case.
http://www.siquest.ca/jbradley.asp
He seems heavy on law enforcement credentials, but rather light on Computer Science. Not sure that is the right combo here.
My point was, why hammer on the '84 times'? Isn't just the one time just as much a 'smoking gun'?
It's sad that our system has become more about winning and less about finding the truth and laying down justice. Here's a horrifying case where police and the prosecutor worked lied to convict a man who ended up in prison for 10 years before being release:
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_18385647
There was another story (not surprising in Denver again) where over 10% of the police force has been reprimanded for lying while on duty. This includes falsifying evidence, police reports and even lying on the stand. Most were still employed for some reason.
That, and the fact that you've got to seriously worry when a report from a piece of software that can confuse the numbers 1 and 84 is being used as evidence in court.
Good on him for having the moral fortitude to correct his error.