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DNA is the book of life. It's also the book of death.

Hard science journalism at it's best. Sheesh.

This, I'm told, is the first time a healthy human has ever been screened for the full gamut of genetic-disease markers.

Yeah, RIGHT. Imagine that lab meeting: Guys, I have a plan, we've never done this before, so lets invite in a journalist and see if we can humiliate ourselves.

Braun, 46, is both jovial and German.

Yes, Homer, Germany is the land of chocolate.

These disease-causing SNPs are fueling a biotech bonanza; the hope is that after finding them, the discoverers can design wonder drugs.

The hope of many of these bottom feeders is that they can identify an SNP and exert some intellectual property over it to horn in on whomever actually can find a treatment. Anyone want me to deliver another manifesto on the evil of this approach?

Alright - let's talk genetic diversity.
As Braun explains it, somewhere in the past, an isolated human community lived in an area where the food was poor in iron. Those who developed a mutation that stores high levels of iron survived, and those who didn't became anemic and died, failing to reproduce.

Good point! This is reason number one NOT to reduce the genetic diversity of the human race. All of these alleles floating around the population - which may become increasingly rare as there is selective pressure against them, and may even cause considerable suffering or death to some of those who carry them - should not be removed from our collective gene pool, at least not without considerable discussion. Why? Because WE MAY NEED THEM. A monoculture (were all organisms have the same genes) is not sustainable in a biological sense.

This is also one of the great tragedies of our times - sub-saharan africa contains only a fraction of the human population, but it contains over a third (depending on how you measure it) of human genetic diversity. The region of the world being devastated by AIDS may contain any number of alleles which our decsendents may need in the population in order to face the challenges of the future, whatever they may be.

"Ja, that's my favorite," says Braun, himself a smoker. "I wonder what Philip Morris would pay for that."

Note that this gene doesn't make it safe to smoke - smoking still causes heart disease and so forth in these people. Still, a treatment to clone this gene into your lungs could make billions, no (clone as in move DNA around)?

These genetic modification treatments may not be such a good idea, either. You all remember in 1999 when a research subject at Penn died from a liver treatment (search for "liver")? The upshot is - anything that delivers genes into a person can, and sooner or later will, go out of control and do things you don't expect. Killing the subject is the most likely, but frankly least frightening, of these possibilities. The real threat - and my colleagues in biotech like to play this down but I am not at all convinced by their arguments - is that vectors for DNA delivery into humans could go wild and become contagious.

Of course, I'm opposed to animal organ transplantation for fear of introducing new human pathogens, so maybe I'm just a naysayer.

I guess Apple will have to find a new way to prove the processing power of their chips...

That was the quote that stuck out most to me, too. However, I am not entirely sure I agree with it.

First of all, it implies some absolute sense of right and wrong ... while this may be indeed be the case, it is somewhat subjective.

I would then argue that there are laws which were appropriate for the time they were created, but have since been outdated. It seems that technology could certainly be a (if not the) major factor in the process of laws becoming outdated.

I'd like to think others can come up with some good examples of this, but for starters, consider child labor laws. This link explains why these laws were "good" in the 1930s and then proceeds to discuss the implications for today.

-- jetlag --

A quick Google search produced these links:

http://www.iacenter.org/maj_1201balt.htm
http://www.sptimes.com/News/061501/Hillsborough/2_ GOP_workers_trigger.shtml
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/GOPCV_ protests000804.html
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/ news/special_packages/school_of_the_americas/21663 30.htm
http://www.appalachianfocus.org/global/600_world_b ank_protesters_arrest.htm

Many of those links refer to something recent when the IMF/WorldBank conviened in Washington, D.C.
Just because it's legal to do it doesn't mean someone's not going to illegally detain you all the same. Happens all the time.

How about one of these?

Practical Flightfor humans.I wanna drink with this guy!

Obviously

I saw a documentary about it on BBC a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I can't remember the title. They gave two groups (men and women) a series of tasks and compared the results. Most women were much better at reading other people's faces and body language, they had better visual memory and they were able to do more tasks at the same time without getting confused. Most men were better at orientation (going through mazes, reading maps, moving around with their eyes closed) and abstraction (using machines and tools without having to concentrate so much on what they were doing). Brains scans also showed that the actual brain tissue is different between both sexes.

One of the funniest tests was when they asked the men and women to draw a bicycle, from memory. Most women drew the right parts, but in the wrong places (ie, the bikes wouldn't work). In men's drawings, all the parts were in the right places. Basically this shows that most women tend to keep visual mental images (ie, they are remembering a specific bicycle) while most men have functional, or conceptual mental images (ie, they are remembering the characteristics that make a bike work, and creating the image from that).

A quick search on Google produced a few interesting pages such as this one, this one or this one.

RMN
~~~

What's even worse is that there's going to be another!

This is even more distressing when one considers that the capacitors in these discarded cellphones are made of an element (tantalum) with an incredibly high cost of extraction in terms of human suffering. The mining of Ta has exacerbated a war in the Congo (which has over 80% of the world's Ta reserves) that has killed more than three million people. See for example What is Coltan? A google search for coltan congo cell phones turns up more.

How about wearing a giant vagina (it is a work-safe link to abc news)??
Just don't wear it to school like this kid did ;-)

More to the point, with this argument (police surveillence) any scattered radiation is generally considered to be accessable, just as trash and other waste is, without a warrant. This was the issue recently with that US supreme court case, Kyllo v. US , in which police used infrared equipment to determine some guy had heat lamps in his attic to grow pot. The ruling decided that this was illegal because this device is not common and the suspect had a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, when you appear in public, you do not have an expectation of privacy, at least when it concerns the visible spectrum (Kyllo v. US would seem to set a precedent against that mind-reading-thing Northwest and the FBI are pursuing...)

As for permission in private photos and movies, my impression is that it is only needed for commercial use. There is also, in keeping with the generally looser exceptions for news agencies, a looser exception for news agencies, hence their ability to use shots of baseball games without getting the permission of everyone in the audience, or news features without the permission of the accused sex offender who is hiding his head with his shirt.

N407ER

- not sure if they were joking though ;)

Aye. The justices (who were women) said that it was basically reprehensible and disgusting, but given the wording of the current law, legal.

Not suprisingly lawmakers have said they're going to alter the voyeurism law so this type of thing does become illegal.

ABC News article

I ride the buses here as well and am strongly in favor of the cameras, as a means of fighting pickpockets, harassment, graffiti, and other crime.

An example where these cameras are NOT having any measureable deterent value can be found here where bullies on school buses still physically beat other students knowing full well they are being videotaped. I'm not sure there is a huge difference between child-aged bullies and adult petty criminals...

GMD

We're dressing up our 16 month old son as this.

Things like this are why there's hostility toward the ADA and those pushing it. It's also why there's a move afoot to amend the ADA to allow businesses 90 days to bring themselves into compliance when there's a complaint, before a suit can be filed. Naturally, the plaintiff's bar thinks this is a bad idea.

How did the FBI catch this guy? I mean, actually catch him? Extradition? If so, then the Russian government agreed to allow him to be tried in the US.

If the Russian government felt that the FBI's crimes weren't very much of a big deal.

Besides Russia isn't exactly a bastion of civil liberties anyway, I'm willing to bet that Russian law enforcement breaks their own laws all the time.

What the FBI did may have been technicaly illigal, but you have to consider motives and damage as well. Buzz Aldrin didn't get prosicuted when he punched that moon-hoax guy in the face and he shouldn't have been.

...or are these kinds of movies notoriously bad?

Antitrust, Swordfish, and even Wargames were very poor movies. The only thing that keeps Wargames alive in my memory is that I wasn't very old when it came out...

But then again, it may just be me getting older...

...or are these kinds of movies notoriously bad?

Antitrust, Swordfish, and even Wargames were very poor movies. The only thing that keeps Wargames alive in my memory is that I wasn't very old when it came out...

But then again, it may just be me getting older...

...or are these kinds of movies notoriously bad?

Antitrust, Swordfish, and even Wargames were very poor movies. The only thing that keeps Wargames alive in my memory is that I wasn't very old when it came out...

But then again, it may just be me getting older...

It is rude to quote, or in this case, wholly transcribe someone else's work without proper credit.
Granted, a large portion of the USA audience knows where to place the credit, but this post was directed to an Australian reader, yes?
The text of the parent post is the script for a segment of Schoolhouse Rock, which appeared on the television network ABC in the United States in the 70's and early 80's.

I believe you are not aware of the whole picture about the big drug companies. Drugs companies at least spend twice as much money on marketing than they do on actually R&D. Also, to cut costs, they tend to take an existing patented drug that is about to expire, modify a bit so a new patent can be obtained, and then market it as a new improved version of the older drug.

The U.S. is the only major country that allows a private company to obtain exclusive rights on a patent where research received funding from public dollars. Hence, people pay up to twice as much for prescription drugs than in countries like Britain, Japan, and Australia.

Big pharma is now just a big marketing engine, where only the real innovative research is mainly being done by public funds.

Some articles worth reading:
http://www.namiscc.org/newsletters/July01/DrugPric es.htm
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/apr01/scrip0204 0101.asp
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/2001-07 -21-nat_journal-Rx_Drugs.asp
http://abcnews.go.com/onair/ABCNEWSSpecials/pharma ceuticals_020529_pjr_feature.html
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/3240359.ht ml
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=5 34&u=/ap/20021001/ap_on_go_co/drug_wars&printe r=1
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=5 34&u=/ap/20021002/ap_on_he_me/pharmaceutical_marke ting&printer=1
http://www.prwatch.org/forum/showthread.php?thread id=420
http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/17/elliott-c.htm l
http://www.prwatch.org/forum/showthread.php?thread id=638
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename= article&node=&contentId=A1208-2001Jul15&notFound=t rue

Maybe here?

"Seven miles off the coast of southern England, a group of American Internet entrepreneurs is planning to set up the world's first offshore data haven."

"Based on the independent principality of Sealand, the self-proclaimed smallest principality in the world, the new company called Havenco promises prospective clients complete security for their computer files and freedom from the laws and regulations of any government."

Everyone knows that the aliens have amazing scientific know-how, and are thus invisible to our primitive technology.

We don't have anything to worry about though; they'll just come to a planet that is two-thirds water (even though they have a severe allergy to it), and try and whup our butts in hand to hand inside of using their vaporizers.

Death by plant spray.

Least, that's what they said in Signs, anyway.

espn scores pages use it as a low-tech solution for refreshing scores.

with Gateway. Here's the first hit from Google.

In a larger sense though, this points up some difficulties with the current way that shrink wrap, click through licensing, EULA's, "terms of use" and the like work.

Users agree to things that they may not understand (if it is couched in sufficiently baroque legalese), or to things that they may never even see. And the fact that sleazoids like these folks can hide behind an EULA is truly despicable and points up the fact that as long as companies are making enough money, they can pretty much do what they want.

I've seen such licences and the like exceed 1000 lines in length and recently saw one in both English and French - the French was essentially a translation of the English (at least for the first few lines). It seems quite possible that it was different and that the differences would commit a user to something fun.

Recently I have found a good one. Go to the abc tv web site and locate the "terms of use" link. (in most browsers is it even visible when you load the page?), then click through to the terms of use page . Interesting reading.

Firstly, not that most people will not even see the link to the terms of use page as it is probably below the bottom of browser windows. It is for me with Mozilla in full screen mode (yech).

Formatted for a 70 character line, this is about 500 lines long and just by visiting the first site, you are agreeing (legally? I think UCITA says yes) to all the terms.

To begin with, you're agreeing to a nicely sweeping claim:

... you signify your agreement to these terms of use. If you do not agree to these terms of use, please do not use the WDIG Site. We reserve the right, at our discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions of these terms at any time. Please check these terms periodically for changes. Your continued use of this WDIG Site following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.

For a good chortle, search for "universe".

Most license agreements have something like this in them. IANAL so I can't even claim to understand the full ramifications of this, so how might a 13 year old who visits the site? Is a 13 year old legally capable of participating in a contract?

"You hereby indemnify, defend, and hold us and our affiliates and our officers, directors, owners, agents, information providers, affiliates, licensors, and licensees (collectively, the "Indemnified Parties") harmless from and against any and all liabilities and costs (including reasonable attorneys' fees') incurred by the Indemnified Parties in connection with any claim arising out of any breach by you of this Agreement or claims arising from your account. You shall use your best efforts to cooperate with us in the defense of any claim. We reserve the right, at our own expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you."

If Kazaa and the like have similar claims in their EULAs, it might mean that even if you are peeved and try to take action against them, you are still responsible for paying for their defense in the legal doodly-doo that ensues. I've seen at least one EULA that seems to say that the user is responsible for any legal action taken against the company. If that is the case, and if M$ had such a clause in their EULA, then they could conceivably make monetary claims against any users of their software in order to pay for the antitrust suit.

For amusement value, as well as insight into the way the US congresscritters are selling their souls to the devil of profit, reading EULA's and the like is highly recommended.

Beware!

I'll probably see it if it rolls around to my part of the country. Now, what movie I'm really looking forward to from the trailer is Comedian. Pretty hilarious.

There are other formats of trailers and more sizes to choose from at the main movie site. Real and WMA are provided in addition to quicktime. Be warned, the page is flash intensive.

I was looking forward to Enterprise and its promise not to use a particle-of-the-week approach to wrapping up each episode. I'm afraid the temporal cold war sounds like another crutch for weak screen writers. Heck, even ESPN's Tuesday morning quarterback is left questioning the situation (find near the end of the article).

At the end of the cliffhanger, something goes horribly wrong and Archer and the agent from the future find themselves again in the San Francisco apartment, but 900 years later. All San Francisco lies in smoking ruins; something Archer did in the past has altered the time line, and that's the cliffhanger. But what TMQ noticed was that except for broken windows, Archer's apartment looked exactly the same in the 31st century as it had in the back-to-the-past scene in the 22nd century. Nothing in Archer's apartment had changed in 900 years.

You know your in trouble when the dumb Jocks are smart enough to figure out something is wrong here.

Think about it. If we Yanks did things by popular vote and majority rule, why would smaller states even bother with the Union. You'd have states seceding left and right. You may not like the outcome, but you've gotta love the system. It worked.

Check out Federalist Papers #39 and #68. The fruits of this debate from over two hundred years ago can be found in the text of our Constitution's Twelfth Amendment.

Still wanna gripe? Consider the fallibility of majority rule. 60% of adults surveyed, agreed or strongly agreed that some people possess extrasensory powers. Does that instantly prove that ESP, telekinesis, and clairvoyance are in fact real? Get a load of this one: 60% of adults surveyed support specific requirements that broadcasters air an hour of educational programming -- or more -- for children each day. They think it should be "required."

There's more to this argument, but a rational observer or participant of the political process should volunteer that the American republic with its electoral college is the best system of government the world over.

As for being the worst leader in our nation's history, I can think of a few others without even thinking of this clown.

Here is the fixed link

But this is kind of cool. A while back, when we Seattleites weathered an earthquake, a pendulum set up in a store that was balanced over sand carved an amazing pattern. It's worth a look, even if it has nothing to do with satellites!

A couple of weeks ago, a man was arrested for taking pictures of police cars in Philadelphia. You can read about it here.

When I was in highschool 12+ years ago, I had a history teacher that went along as a chaperone on a school-sponsored trip to East Germany and the USSR. He relayed a story about one of the students on the trip starting to photograph a police officer and getting in a lot of trouble because of being perceived as a spy.

We thought that was shocking, then, that a country could be so totalitarian as to prevent photographs of police officers.

But anyway, just bring a flask. I haven't gotten searched for one yet, hopefully you won't. Either that, or just get so hammered before the game that you're good for a few hours. That's been working for me too.

On a sidenote, if anybody's watching College Gameday on ESPN at 10:30am EST, look out for the drunken bastard in a #32 jersey wearing facepaint that looks like The Ultimate Warrior's (in Scarlet and Gray, of course) -- That's me! The game starts at 3:37pm, that's a LONG time to tailgate. I'm so pumped!

I don't know if you've been into a Blockbuster's recently, or maybe it's just my area, but the late fee structure has changed. Instead of a per-day extended viewing charge, my local Blockbuster's just charges the same rental rate (for the same block of time) if the movie isn't returned on time. I believe this is in response to a class action lawsuit.

I've been unemployed for the better part of a year now, thanks (in part) to the market. I would do exactly what I've been doing, minus the job-hunt and independant contracting parts...

• Get up early, say... sometime around 7 or 7:30am.
• Shower, eat breakfast and have my morning coffee.
• Spend a couple hours browsing around the web, hitting the computer gaming (mainly rpg) and pool/billiards sites and newsgroups.
• Watch a little television (The Practice... 10:00 CST on FX) while I eat an early lunch.
• Spend the afternoon on my personal sites, and any chores around the house that need to be done, or reading any of the various books on my list. Alternatively, I'd spend the afternoon at the local pool halls.
• Have dinner with my girlfriend
• Hit the local pool halls around 6:30-7:00pm and play until they close.

I'm already fairly single-minded when it comes to pool and billiards, but if I didn't have to worry about income, I'd sink into full-on obsession. Thing is, I'd still maintain a certain structure to my days. I'd have a couple things that I *always* tried to do at the same time (such as The Practice at 10:00am, and dishes at 4:30). I find for me, and think it's generally true, that a completely unstructured life is a wasteful one.

Mexican Teen Pop Singer Ricardo Abarca Loses Fingers in Helicopter Accident

GUATEMALA CITY, Sept. 4
Doctors reattached three fingers to the hand of a a 16-year-old pop singer, after they were severed by a helicopter rotor as he waved to fans.

Ricardo Abarca was getting off the aircraft at a Guatemala City airport on Saturday. In raising his hand to greet fans, he put it into the still-whirling rotor.

"The index finger and middle finger were completely severed" surgeon Gustavo Lopez said Wednesday. "We still have some problems with bleeding from the area of his little finger"

Abarca, who had only recently joined the popular teen group Mageneto, was still hospitalized in Guatemala Wednesday.

[I hate spicks and beaners, so this story really made my day]

A voting drive? Now where am I going to get the cash for a truckload of "complimentary" cigarettes?

Scientists Create Lullabies From Brain Waves

Updated 11:45 PM ET August 28, 2002

- Some time ago I had a record album that seemed magical. It put me to sleep within minutes.

Now, it turns out that it may not have been magic at all, but science.

Researchers at the University of Toronto's sleep clinic have found that the human brain creates its own internal music, and that same music can be used to fight a common problem that affects millions of people across the continent: anxiety insomnia.

By playing their own "brain music" back to them, researchers were able to get persons with sleeping disorders to fall asleep more quickly, and to sleep more soundly, according to psychiatrist Leonid Kayumov, director of the clinic.

Of course, this "music," which consists of an audible "printout" of sleep-inducing brain waves, doesn't exactly sound like Barry Manilow, and you can't buy it at your local record store.

'Odd' Lullaby

"It sounds odd," Kayumov says. "You wouldn't recognize it as music. Sometimes there are harmonic frequencies, sometimes it's total cacophony." Sometimes, he adds, it sounds a little like Chinese, sometimes it sounds a little like a melody.

"I find some people have nicer music," he says.

But each of us produces our own brain music, and each is different.

Kayumov, who discussed his clinic's research at a recent annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Society in Seattle, says up to 40 percent of the general population suffers from some kind of insomnia, and most of those problems "may be related to stress anxiety." Balancing the checkbook, or dealing with a problem at work or home, may keep us from falling asleep in the evening, or cause us to wake up a long time before the alarm clock goes off.

Kayumov and his colleagues excluded people from the study who have severe neurological disorders that keep them awake, and concentrated instead on ordinary folks who have trouble sleeping. Ten persons who had suffered from insomnia for at least two years were selected for the study, and they were taken into the lab in the university's Western Hospital and hooked up to a portable device that zeroes in on brain waves.

Promising Results

The device produces a graph that looks a little like an electrocardiogram, but it portrays brain waves, not heart functions. The two are different in that brain waves are a much faster frequency, producing about 70 fluctuations per second.

"Basically, it gives you kind of a printout of the brain," he says.

That printout is fed into a computer, which produces an audio track that corresponds to the frequency and patterns of the brain wave. And that, he adds, is the music of the brain.

"What is music?" he asks. "It is organized sound oscillations which change in rhythm, volume, amplitude, tones and so on. The same analogy applies to brain activity. It's electrical oscillations. And using computerized algorithms we convert them into sound. So it's a printout of the brain, but expressed in sounds."

Each participant was given a recording of the sound and sent home with instructions to listen to it just before bedtime if they have trouble falling asleep, or during the night if they can't stay asleep. Four weeks later, they returned to the clinic for further testing.

The participants showed dramatic improvement over placebo participants who listened to someone else's brain music instead of their own.

"For the placebo group, the improvement was only about 15 percent as compared to 75 to 85 percent for the experimental group. So it's a highly significant statistical difference," Kayumov says. It also shows that brain music is highly individualistic.

It worked, he adds, because the sleep music was lower in frequency than other brain waves and induced kind of a relaxed, meditative condition. In other words, each subject's brain recognized its own lullaby and reacted accordingly.

The "music" was so different from other brain waves that the researchers are now experimenting with creating sound tracks that will help curb such things as bed wetting among children.

Even far more serious mental problems might be helped by similar techniques, he says.

"Even the diseased brain has such enormous reserves that we can use the brain activity, even from a diseased brain, to heal it," he says. An anti-anxiety response, for example, can be produced even in someone who is seriously impaired by reproducing sounds that stimulate relaxation.

Relaxation in a CD

A research sample of 10 persons is not a large group, but the project builds on numerous other related studies at the clinic, and Kayumov believes the results are quite convincing. The long-range goal, he says, is to move the technology from the research lab to the clinic.

Hopefully, some day people with serious sleep disorders will be able to check into a clinic and leave an hour or so later with a compact disc, loaded with sounds that originated in their own brains. Those sounds will be used to generate brain waves that induce relaxation, leading to sleep.

And here's the neat part. It won't become addictive. There won't be any serious side effects, like those caused by various medications that are now available.

All it will be is music, created in the person's own brain. How about that for a relaxing tune?

Lee Dye's column appears weekly on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times , he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.

Yep, that woulda been right here on slashdot, linking to abcnews, June 2000.

I first noticed this on cnn's frontpage.

Searched /. for "gecko" and showed me that this is old news (June 2000) found here.

3 of the 5 'related articles' submitted by posters there are old enough to be broken (cnn/msnbc/EurekAlert). The two that work (and expose how old the story REALLY is) are this and this. The dates for these are June 8th 2000 and June 7th 2000.

It looks like nothing has changed since then wrt the research. About the only thing I see different is that Spiderman wasn't in fashion 2 years ago. Seems like hype instead of real news. I guess it's a slow day if every news-organization thinks it's ready for re-print.

Am I missing something, or is this story over two years old?

Pop a couple Provigil at midnight and you'll be wide awake and calm while your opponents are twitching uncontrollably from prolonged caffeine overdose.

I enjoy a good drink like any late night nerd does. But it is too easy to "OD" on caffeine without knowing it. I have some links to provide food for thought;

An interesting page about liquid candy

Some deaths associated with red bull/energy drinks

Another caffeine death

I am not saying give up your drinks. But I am saying be smart about it. Don't drink/eat so much caffeine that you make yourself feel miserable with the symptoms of too much caffeine. while it is thought that 10 grams is a fatal overdose, I would be willing to bet that a fraction of that can make you feel pretty miserable and is very easily reached with some of the caffeinated drinks/candies/pills out there. A couple liters of mountain dew, four red bulls, and a handful of penguine mints or any combination thereof places you at about 1 gram.

It goes without saying drinking alcohol at the same time exacerbates things.

Also, caffeine is not a substitute for sleep. There are reasons that the body needs to sleep. So if you are depriving your body of sleep for whatever reason you need to start asking yourself what your priorities are. Sleep "binging" where you go without sleep all week and catch up on the weekends is also unhealthy, but this is another topic in itself.

This post is not intended to be medical advice. See your doctor if you have any questions/symptoms. Yada yada yada.

FYI: Red Bull + alcohol

Just sayin'.

forget geordie, hook it up to one of those sony cameras that let you see though clothes. where do i sign? i'll participate in some clinical trials. -smead

While I agree that we have way too many people jailed because of nonviolent drug-related offenses, I don't think that this sheer number of incarcerated people is a black mark on America's human rights record. As a drastic comparison, let's consider Nigeria, where the punishment for adultery is death-by-stoning. I am betting that they have way fewer people in prison (check both total number and per capita for South Africa) than the US, yet I would hardly call Nigeria generous in the human rights department.

Carl Sagan