Legal Hypothetical: Guilty of one of two crimes

I wondered here, http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/230434.html, what would happen if a court were sure beyond reasonable doubt you were guilty of one of two crimes, but had no convincing evidence which. Would they have to let you go, or could they sentence you to the lesser sentence[1]? I had a fairly dramatic example letting you get away with murder, but doing some research now I find at least one took the common sense approach.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=7th&navby=case&no=993601

An American case, but I guess valid precedent over there at least. A corner shop was found to have redeemed more food stamps[2] from the government than they had reported in revenue. Thus they had probably cheated their stamps, and possibly lied about their revenue, (or maybe both), and the defense tried to create doubt about which, even thought the discrepency was beyond doubt, and argue that neither was beyond doubt.

The court, fairly sensibly imho, decided she was liable to punsihment for the lesser crime if there was reasonable doubt on the greater. Though I don't know if based on anything other than fairness.

[1] There could still be a problem if the sentences were different in type, not just different periods of imprisonment, but fortunately all British sentences are fairly easily comparable, or have sufficient discretion to be made so. If not, I guess you could be offered a choice or something?

[2] Issued by the government to people who need them, redeemable at shops for food and other essential items. (Notorious for being confusing what is and isn't covered.) The government then pays the shop back.

***he***cking Snakes on a ***he***cking Plane

You know movies so bad they're good? This was so really awful it was great! The trailers led me to think it was going to try to take itself seriously, but no, it threw itself into the hype with abandon. I'm not sure how much was changed at the behest of the prerelease online hype, but it made me think of the "thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years eventually producing shakespear" dictum. The internet is commonly cited as a counterexample, but it seems the internet produces Snakes on a Plane, which I can't really argue with.

It's slightly squicky in a few places, but otherwise a great laugh.

( Spoilers )

Talking about maths

Last night at the Carlton contained more maths than I've heard for a while, talking with Simon and Tony and Deborah about generalisations of Simon's infinity machine, which can run an infinite number of instructions in second. I'd been thinking about this all week, but ended up mostly agreeing with Simon's original comments.

It's strange to be someone who knows something about it, when normally I'm talking about technology someone else knows more about, or maths with people who know more, or with people who aren't interested in either :)

Choice quotes:

The clever solution to the infinite-number-of-people-buried-in-the-sand-puzzle is all very well, but what if one of them is a bridget jones? "Today. Oh dear, got squiffy and killed an infinite number of people because I couldn't count to two. Oopsie. Alchohol units: 2. Deaths: Aleph-0. V. v. bad."

The machine is uncountable, not psychic.

OK, suppose it does one operation for each moment of (real valued) time.
Oh my god, that's awful. You know what we've invented? We've invented BASIC!

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO PI

ETA: We may have made a mockery of "Beginners" Instruction Langauge but we've got "All Purpose" down pat!

Of course, you could use an infinite number of copies of yourself as a spam filter.

My head hurts. Lets not talk about maths any more.