OT: n guilty men: what is n? [Was: Re: FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe...]

[Alois Mahdal <Alois.Mahdal.1-ndmail@zxcvb.cz>]

On Tue, 20 May 2014 09:45:00 -0400
Celejar <celejar@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> On 5/20/14, Celejar <celejar@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > >>> But this is precisely the problem with some of the
> > >>> dogmatic idealists here - by this logic, we should
> > >>> abolish criminal justice entirely, as it's virtually
> > >>> impossible to guarantee that "no one blameless" will
> > >>> ever be "persecuted":
> > >>> http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm
 
[...]

> If you take the trouble to follow the link I posted above,
> you'll see an entire paper - one of the most brilliantly
> erudite and funniest things I have ever read - devoted to
> that question.

I am confused about the meaning of n.  He first states that

  n = (P - 10) / 10; # P being population of Sodom,

so n has no particular known weight or meaning:  Is it n = 1 if
we save 1 innocent for 1 guilty? Is it n = 10 if we save 1
innocent for 10 guilty?  That would almost make sense except
that it would silently imply P = 110.

Then, in the rest of the article, he refers to n but, failing
to explain the meaning of it, I don't see any point of reading
it.

Did I miss something?

Thanks,
aL.