Brock Beauchamp

Yeah, the villains were always interesting but I was just tired of seeing the same predictable events play out over and over again. It didn't help that Kirkman kept killing protagonists. I understand why he felt he needed to do it but the replacements were never as interesting as the original characters. And even that became predictable and boring after a time. You knew someone was going to die each time they reached the "conflict!" section of the cycle, which mitigates the impact of the coming death.

Season two *really* soured me on the show. It was terrible. Season three was much better and I watched part (maybe even all) of season four but the damage was already done in my eyes. Because I know how the comic *also* spirals down the drain slowly from #50-110-ish, I had no reason to continue watching it and subject myself to the story (again). My biggest issue with the comic is that it has a 30 issue cycle and rinses/repeats the exact same story over and over again. Find a safe haven! We're safe! Oh no, bad humans! Fight! Flee! Find safety! Repeat! The comic - at least when I stopped reading around 110-115 - badly needed a breath of fresh air.

I haven't watched the show in ages. So Negan beat someone with a bat, eh? If they follow the comics at all, I know where this is going... And it's the point where I threw up my hands and stopped reading the books (not right away, finished maybe ~10 issues after that point but was doing it more out of habit than actual interest in the story).

SS is probably the weakest position of depth but I think Polanco can roll out there and not embarrass himself or the team. It's not an optimal situation but it probably wouldn't kill the team.

You just hit the nail on the head why I think these projections are underestimating the team. The Twins' depth isn't spectacular but it's solid up and down the board. And teams with depth tend to do well for themselves over 162 games. The Twins *should* be able to plug and play almost any position on the diamond with a better than replacement level player. Pick a guy around the diamond. If that guy falters or goes down, there's somebody with promise behind him who can provide quality at-bats, defense, or innings pitched. The one big question mark is the bullpen, IMO. The rest of team looks solid, though unspectacular. I'm sticking with my 83 win over/under for 2016.

He's 22 years old. You do realize what happens to adult males in their early 20s, right?

But didn't he actually lose weight? I thought he did. So are we complaining he didn't lose enough weight? All of this seems ridiculous to me.

Agreed on most every count. Rosario has a high ceiling bit I'm skeptical he'll ever get there. Players who swing at everything have an uphill battle to success in the majors.

It's entirely possible. Rosario has the talent to do it but his approach needs to change. If he accomplishes that goal, his ceiling is probably an .800 OPS player with plus defense. In other words, a borderline elite player.

The thing is, it's not entirely probabilisitic supposition. I've linked two articles that plainly stated the kind of data required to accurately track a cellphone is not available after the fact. It needs to done in real time (or, in modern cases, lifted off the phone's GPS receiver) because it requires active, coordinated signal broadcasting from several towers. Maybe the data is correct and Teresa's phone was 12 miles away immediately after the murder... But, unfortunately, that wouldn't matter because the data cannot be relied upon as a source of truth. It's a notoriously unreliable way to determine the location of a phone and is more of a guess than science. It's akin to putting a fall-down drunk on the stand as an eyewitness. Hey, maybe the drunk is right and somehow clearly remembers the events that transpired. But you can't rely on a fall-down drunk witness. Hey, I hope Zellner can get a retrial because that original trial looked incomplete and stacked against Avery. But cell tower data isn't proof of innocence on its own.

May didn't exactly light the world on fire in that appearance.

Both are correct, it depends on perspective. When you release the pedal, the clutch "engages" the transmission. But you personally are "engaging" the clutch itself when you press the pedal, as in interacting with it. Tomato, tomahto.

Nice piece of hitting from Eddie.

Damn, that was one fine bunt.

Hah! I was going to pop in and post the *exact* same thing.

1. While towers may not be sending out data to a phone every second - I haven't bothered to research this and don't know off-hand - they're communicating with the phone often. How do you think your signal bar changes or a specific tower knows to deliver a call to your phone? The phone and tower need to remain in near-constant contact for cell service to work. When someone calls a cell phone, it's not as if every Verizon tower in the world screams "Phone, where are you?" The phone is constantly in contact with local towers so that hand-off is smooth, instantaneous, and requires as few resources as possible. 2. Such data is easily collected but the transmission, storage, and maintenance of this data is costly and really, when you get right down to it, entirely pointless for a phone company to gather. You're grossly underestimating what is required to collect this kind of data: the network infrastructure, synchronized towers, vast data centers, support staff, etc. Verizon Wireless is not the NSA; they have no vested interest in storing gigabytes of data for every user on their network. And yes, it would require gigabytes of data. I deal with data every day. Collecting it is easy in 2016 but in the mid-2000s, it was an extremely expensive endeavor and companies collected only the data they required because "overhead". 3. That article was quite clear phone companies do not keep triangulation data. And that was my point all along: it makes sense that no company would record that kind of data in the capacity required to give us meaningful information (multiple towers, simultaneous contact, response time, etc). A triangulation ping is an active request from three towers at the same moment. The fact that it's an active request is right there in the name: "ping". Its origins come from sonar and the sound received when an active, directed signal hits an underwater object and returns to the source. The sound returned to the origin point was/is "ping!". It makes zero sense that a company would consume the massive amount of tower resources required to continually monitor triangulation of phones and then have to go through the effort of transmitting, syncing, storing, and maintaining data... A lot of data. Which brings me to the next point... 4. Does the lawyer have records of the phone contacting a specific tower? Sure, probably, I've never disputed that point. It makes sense... But there's a wide gulf between a phone initializing with a tower and keeping a record of it versus receiving "triangulation data" - the article's words, not mine. What is *likely* is that the lawyer has a record of a phone initializing contact with a tower. That means no response time, no triangulation, just a "Hi, I'm here. If someone calls me, you're the tower that needs to send me that call". Phone companies absolutely keep simple data logs of tower connections because it's impossible to run a reliable network without basic usage logs to monitor traffic, peaks/valleys, and then compare it to system capacity. It's how a company decides where to expand a network and in what capacity to expand it. Now a simple initialization communication is problematic for several reasons: - This is a rural area. For obvious reasons, in rural areas they build far fewer cell towers because the biggest limitation on a cell tower is often not its range but its capacity. Cities have loads and loads of towers to maintain 100,000 simultaneous phone calls at any given moment. Rural areas don't need this so they build towers further apart and put them on really tall poles so they only need to build a tower every 5 or 10 or 20 miles, not every few thousand feet. - The less towers you have in the area and the further apart they are, the less likely it is for a phone to connect to enough towers in a short enough period of time to glean useful information. In a city environment, a phone might communicate with 5-6 towers in a, say, 20 minute span. At that point, you can probably glean where the phone is within a few square miles (we're still talking pretty massive distances here even under ideal circumstances). In a rural environment, there might only be one tower to connect to at all... Or maybe it can connect to two towers but they're both physically in-line with the phone. That doesn't give much in the way of useful data to glean from a simple "Hi, I'm here" connection. - Without response time and/or real triangulation data, you know a phone is within speaking distance of a tower, nothing more. And, as I've pointed out, "speaking distance" can be a really long way. I think it's about 20 miles for GSM but much more for CDMA, upwards of 40 miles in real-world situations. - Cell phones often fail to connect to the closest tower. There are a dozen reasons for this to happen. It could be weather, it could be terrain, it could be tower capacity, it could be the phone is just being stupid for a moment. A phone can easily overlook a tower two miles from it and instead connect to a tower 20 miles away. Ever been standing next to a buddy and your phone has one bar while his/hers has full bars? That's probably what happened. For whatever reason, your phone is being a dumbass and is shaking hands with a tower just *barely* within reach. Here's another decent article on the subject. I'm basing most of my argument from actual reading I've done in the past but the more I dig into it, the more I believe this data is probably useless. Note that I said "probably" because there are a host of reasons for the data to be inaccurate but in very specific conditions, it *might* be useful. But, again, that's really unlikely. Which is why it's likely this data will neither tell us where Teresa was located nor will it tell us where she wasn't located. Not with any kind of reliability, anyway. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-your-cell-phone-cant-tell-the-police And keep in mind while reading these articles: they were written in the 2010s while the Avery crime happened in the mid-2000s. It's the cell phone equivalent of modern day versus the Victorian era.

Just read this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/experts-say-law-enforcements-use-of-cellphone-records-can-be-inaccurate/2014/06/27/028be93c-faf3-11e3-932c-0a55b81f48ce_story.html "Use of historical cell-site locator data is different than real-time triangulation of three cell towers to locate a phone, or GPS technology using satellites. The accuracy of those technologies is not in dispute, but phone companies do not save GPS or triangulation data for an individual phone — so that information is not used as evidence." That's what I mean by "past tense". The amount of bandwidth and infrastructure required to record that data is overwhelming so companies don't do it. Without (nearly, for clarity) identical tower pings and exact response times, triangulation cannot happen. It simply can not happen. It's the very definition of "triangulation". And you're misinterpreting what constitutes a "ping". A ping is a circuit. A phone cannot ping three towers with one signal. This is how a ping works: Tower A --> Phone --> Tower A If another tower wants to ping the phone: Tower B --> Phone --> Tower B It's only the corresponding signal return that can indicate distance with any accuracy. The tower registers how quickly the phone responds to its origin signal and then makes a judgment based on speed of light and system latency. If the ping originated with the phone, the phone would end up with the data, not the tower. Which also makes the system somewhat prone to error because signal bounce, noise, weather, etc can alter response time.

What assumptions have I made? That triangulation in the past tense is impossible? Please, refute that point. Have at it.

For example, here's the math on such a data store: Let's say a phone company needs to store user data of this kind. They record once per second. On the *light* side of this, we'll say this data store, captured once a second (not often by technology standards) consumes just 32 bytes of data (virtually nothing). 32 bytes 60 seconds 60 minutes 24 hours 365 days Now multiply this by in-signal towers... In this case we'll say three. That's 3.1GB per user, per year. Verizon has 137 million users. And this isn't even bringing up the pipes required to transfer this kind of data. And that's what you'd need to triangulate. So... No.

And honestly, I no longer give a damn about this case. But , as many of you know by now, I hate lazy/incorrect technical analysis.

I'm not suggesting there is a technological impasse that prevents the data from being meaningful, I'm saying it's higgghhly unlikely it has any meaning. In a world where a phone can ping a tower from 50+ miles under common real-world situations, simple ping data tells us virtually nothing. And using the word "triangulation" in that article is wrong. That's not opinion, that's basic mathematics. You can't triangulate the past without real-time tracking data logs (literally multiple sources syncing pings and response times down to milliseconds)... And I think we can all apply enough common sense to admit that doesn't exist today, much less 2006.

Um, no. A triangulation requires data from no less than three sources at the identical moment or it's gibberish and prone to wild inaccuracies. The identical moment. Oh, and exact response time needs to be recorded or it's, again, gibberish. A phone can ping 16 towers but without response time, you just draw a big circle on a map and say "this person is generally somewhere around here"... And "here" is a 100+ square mile area. This is pretty simple math, really. And how on earth can something be triangulated in 2006 without the cell company getting involved?

And that article uses the word "triangulation". Phone companies don't track and sync triangulation data. They don't keep every bit of useless data "just because". AFAIK, there's no way to "triangulate" ten year old phone movement (in the capacity required to triangulate) because it makes no sense for anyone to keep that data. People need to stop watching CSI, man.

ESPECIALLY in 2006 in a rural area. Seriously, guys, phones back then could randomly hit a tower miles away because there *were* no other towers to hit. A phone can just barely whisper to a tower well outside the distance once can actually establish a phone call. It's still a "ping". A connection was established. The phone said "I'm here, I exist". I'm not discounting the evidence nor am I putting much stock in it, just pointing out that in a vacuum, pinging a tower means *very* little. From a purely technical standpoint, a phone can ping a tower from 100+ miles depending on terrain and laws surrounding signal strength. Yeah, I just said "100+ miles".

Modern conservatism is built upon the premise of the majority voting against their own interests. It's fascinating the scale in which the GOP has accomplished this goal. Truly breathtaking.