Look, I don't like COBOL as a language, never have. I dislike it almost as much as I do Python (for diametrically opposite reasons). Thing is, it has worked for a very long time, and governments around the globe are still using it to this day. I know up here in "where you're moving when Trump wins" Canada, we have a lot of gov't projects to migrate off of old COBOL systems. It's not because the old system is broken: it ain't. It's because the people who can maintain such systems are dying of old age.
It's not a simple matter of watching a Youtube video made by a 12 year old. The language itself is quite simple, it's the fifty years of legacy code that make it a nightmare to find new blood, and the few who can pull it off get to charge whatever they want. On paper, this becomes a steep liability, which is why departments are making the largely financial decision to migrate.
Problem is, governments are legendary at hiring the most incompetent, 7000% over budget, milk-the-cash-cow-dry kind of contractors. Whether it's due to corruption or ineptitude, it's true up here in Apologyland. It's true down there in Gunfreakland. It's probably true across the pond in Thataintfoodland.
Don't blame COBOL, that old dog has done us well for most of our lifetimes. Blame these idiots who can't manage their contractors, and the contractors who can't manage their idiots.
Indeed. An advantage of COBOL is that any shmuck with a minimum of general programming instruction and a good manual can maintain existing code; and it isn't likely to dig into the OS and do serious damage the way erroneous C code, for instance, might. As you say, the problem is the ancient code with decades of patches of various quality applied and documentation mostly shredded. I've seen code written in "modern" languages within the previous few years which was unmaintainable, mostly because the original specs, if there ever were any, are lost in the mists of time. One particular such is burned into my mind to this day; the correct function of the program depended on a semicolon which should have been there being missing; when that error was fixed, the program always crashed. And it was of such structure that there was no way to despaghetti the code.
Still uses its tongue to lap up water. So, was there a point to this piece of "sheer genius" expressing concern on Cobol. And lest we forget the fun systems run by Fortran.
Reminds me of those people advocating fusion power as just needing more research to become usable. Come on, folks, fusion power is literally billions of years old.
Someone could be making mega bucks to sell them a system that does the same thing.
Of course it would be slower, lacking features, years late and way over budget, same as any other modern government software programme
But it would run on your phone, mostly, (presuming your battery didn't run out).
Looked like coaxial. May have been Type 1 shielded twisted pair cable. That was my first and last time I dealt with Token Ring in the field.
You had token ring? Ha! You had it good! My generation had to deal with Tolkien Ring! On the other hand, it totally ruled. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If only Americans knew how much of their financial institutions still ran on COBOL, and the outrage that would ensue...... but seriously, come on. These stories are nothing new, and they'll continue for decades. IT projects are always looked at with a sense of dollars - with band aids being particularly cheap.
30+ years ago, I learned a little COBOL (thinking it would get my 15 year old ass a tiny bit of respect from the mainframers). I would never admit it IRL.
In college (decades ago) I listed the languages I could code in for a prof. It tailed off with me looking at the ground and mumbling 'cobol'. The professor noted at the time that everybody who can code in COBOL is embarrassed by that fact.
40+ years ago, I learned a little LISP (thinking it would get my 20 year old ass a tiny bit of respect from the cutting edge developers).
40+ years later, the folks who learned a little COBOL probably have a better chance of getting hired than the folks who learned a little LISP.
I've never seen one that did that. I'm sure they are out there, but all the "reasonable" ones turn into a pure off-grid system when the grid is down, and when the grid comes back up, will re-link back with it. Meter runs both ways. And when the grid is down, an isolation circuit kicks in and separates you from the grid.
Maybe the rules are different where you are, but seems common. I even found a standard for disconnecting a working solar system from a dead grid. DIN VDE 0126.1. Why have a standard on how to do it if it was never done?
As with any kind of emergency generator, for instance, the law requires you to incorporate a system that keeps your generated voltage off the power lines when they are not powered. If you think about the guys who need to fix the lines which are down, it seems reasonable.
*People* never thought is was a good idea: oil and automotive executives do, because hydrogen maintains a gas station-style distribution network. That's why they try so hard to sell it to you.
They hate nothing more than people charging up at home, on their own terms, with the electricity provider of their choosing, possibly with their own solar.
The other thing they like about hydrogen is that it can bridge the gap; burn it in internal combustion engines, then use it in fuel cells for electric vehicles.
Selling your drug to the citizens of a country that has leadership which performs horrible things or
Employing people in a country that has leadership which performs horrible things
vs
Selling your drug directly to an organisation which will do horrible things with your product.
The first part still isn't great, but there's still a world of difference.
Which leads us to "big software companies who have to kowtow to the whims of tyrannies to be allowed to do business with their billions of citizens"
Corporations exist to reduce individual livability & allow a group of people to act as one under the law.
More the latter than the former.
Jeff's construction simply would never have the resources to put together a mega project like a large bridge, skyscraper, or dam, or what if Jeff died midway through the project and the company was dissolved and diluted through his heirs? And is anybody on the hook.. since the construction contract was with Jeff personally and he's dead now...
A corporation exists primarily to allow people to pool capital and provide 'governance' for it that can survive an individual.
Everything else is 2ndary.
Then why do they persist with this limited liability thing if the whole point is to organize massive projects? In China you see executives getting executed all the time for decisions which injure the public, here they lose their jobs, get a golden parachute, and get picked up in another corporate executive job when the fuss dies down, I do see your point about organizing massive projects needing an actual organization, but the insulation from responsibility is not required for that function.
You asked a snarky, ignorant question intended to push some agenda of yours that characterizes the people who own and run businesses as being unable to have feelings. That was an absurd posture on your part. I gave you something to react to. Feel free, instead of resorting to lazy ad hominem, to point out where in the chain of events you just read the transition occurs to the person running a business no longer being able to have feelings. Be specific, or consider no longer trying to paint that whiny Corporations Are Evil Robots image you were lamely hoping to get across.
If you think a corporation like Pfizer is comparable to any small business you have a serious problem with your ability to think
So, at what point do the people running the business stop being people? Be specific. Is it when the company is made of 2 people? 20? 200? 2,000? 20,000? Be specific about the number, and by what mechanism you think that the people making the decisions are no longer themselves, no longer able to consider their values, and no longer have feelings. Explain why one person LESS than the size you think is some robotic non-feeling entity is still able to have feelings, but one person MORE than that number no longer is. Talk about what happens when that one extra person comes on board. No, really. See if you can coherently explain your theory, and how it applies to one person more, and less than the number that you think scales human decision making from one mode to another.
The truth is, you don't even know anybody who has successfully launched and grown a business to the point where there are hundreds or thousands of people involved. Because you can't rely on a personal experience of having sat down and actually talked to someone like that, you're conjuring up a fantasy notion of who they become, so that you have something abstract to hate, since that what makes you tick. That whole "get help" BS? It's called "projection," dude. Look it up.
You mean, like would a corporation hypothetically produce cars that don't meet mandated emission standards and tweak the software to game the testing, and flounder around trying to find who is responsible for making that decision? Can't happen! Just because it's a Limited Liability Corporation doesn't mean the individuals who decide "We must produce a car with this basic design that meets the standards and I won't take no for an answer" and the guy trying to implement the decision who realizes "If this is doable it's not doable by this company, what was that Kobayashi Maru thing again?" might each feel like they're only doing what they have to do and neither foresees the end result, let alone takes full responsibility for it, the way either of them would if he was the only person in charge of running the operation, designing the car, building it, and testing it.
You might want to look up "recidivism" in a dictionary, and then maybe some research into the "recidivism rate", which is not zero.
In a universe that contains "recidivism", but does not contain "zombie crime spree", execution must, by the definitions of the words involved, deter and prevent crime.
Q.E.D.
Except where the existence of the death penalty has a causative effect on the murder rate. For instance, where the perp recognizes that he has to kill all the witnesses so he won't get the death penalty after one person gets killed. Or where they decide the best approach is to kill everybody up front so as to reduce the odds something goes real wrong during the crime and they end up captured and on death row. Or they get the clear message that it's ok to kill people who deserve it, and they can think of a few. Etc etc etc.
See also "Why you can't end terrorism by just killing all the terrorists"
Except, of course, capital punishment isn't actually a deterrents.
It's vengeance, pure and simple, and while I understand why people want it, if it is going to continue, it shouldn't be wrapped up in the language of crime prevention, because it doesn't prevent crimes. Allowing capital punishment to be justified in this way is simply a way to make it more palatable, and state-sanctioned killings should be anything but palatable.
Whether anyone is deterred by the possibility of a State Execution while contemplating an act that carries the Capital Punishment is debatable, once on Death Row they sure try mighty hard to get stay alive
Judging from the last few such cases here in Connecticut, they seem to request an end to appeals and that they be put to death at least as often as they try to get out of it.
Nice theory, but the way people make decisions is pretty complex and influenced by many factors. Research does not support your conclusion: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~cha...
If the death penalty was an effective rational deterrent to murder, then the death rate from automotive travel would put the auto manufacturers out of business. The fact is the risk assessment gadget in people's brains is one of God's crappiest products ever.
However, if you are thinking about murder, and you start imagining the needle is waiting for you
Do you really think a mugger or whatever is thinking that far ahead?
Sure, it's going to stop the honest people who consider their actions and consequences but they already have plenty of things to stop them.
Criminals have a bad habit of not doing what they are told to do so your "sending a message" is unlikely to work. Maybe those "flower child researchers", some of who served in Korea and Vietnam, fit your definition of "a real man" more than any of the readers of this website and thus did not arrive at "flower child conclusions". Criminology isn't for the faint of heart after all.
Considering how many murders are crimes of passion where the cops arrive and find the killer standing there over the body with the weapon still in his hand, having made no effort to evade capture or cover up his guilt at all.
In the 1970's, the flower child generation spawned flower child researchers who used social "science" to arrive at flower child conclusions that they wanted. We are still feeling the effects of this bad research in many areas. This era was the plague that will not go away. Many of these are often discussed on these forums, I am looking at your gender wage discrepancy. There are many others.
If you stop and use the smell test a bit, tie to you own life. Threat of punishment is always in the calculus of a crime. If you steal that post it note, and the worst you get is a cold hard stare from an HR lady, you may do it. If it leads to your immediate termination, you leave that note the hell alone.
The death penalty will not deter a crime of passion. That is absolutely true. However, if you are thinking about murder, and you start imagining the needle is waiting for you.... Its a little different.
Anyways, people resist these old studies, and they often find different conclusions. Here is one on this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Yeah, I remember when Connecticut did away with the death penalty a few years back. Like everyone, I had been planning to kill a bunch of people but it was such a pain to get them on a bus and take them to Massachusetts or Rhode Island or someplace else without the death penalty; but now I can kill them right here at home, so much more tempting.
Not this case, there are many ways to kill people, none of them are humane...
Capital punishment is widely considered cruel and inhuman punishment in violation of the human rights convention.
The US and Japan is the last western countries to maintain this barbaric practice...
No, I think it's alright for companies to stand up against this issue.. Seriously, European countries have threaten local companies that they could face criminal charges if they exported drugs intended to murder people.
I'm not even sure that's so far fetched, when capital punishment is seen as a human rights violation, why shouldn't your company be held responsible for murder, if you export drugs for such purposes.
If they want to use the medical industry to execute prisoners, just admit them to hospitals for a while until they get a hospital-acquired infection. UTI, clostridium, pneumonia, RIP. Works for non-prisoners, don't see why it wouldn't work for prisoners.
I've never gotten the reason for a lethal injection or some of the more exotic forms of execution. Strapping someone to a gurney and fiddling around for 20 minutes trying to find the veins to inject drugs and then watching for another 30 as they thrash around because it was botched is supposed to be "humane".
If a state was being "humane" it wouldn't execute people in the first place. And that being so it should just drop the pretense and shoot them. Shoot them in the heart and they'll rapidly lose consciousness and die. It's quick, it's effective, it's cheap. And it could be done in a way that doesn't require a human firing squad if that's a concern.
Like going to the doctor to get a shot to make you healthy isn't aversive to the average person; getting an IV to kill you is supposed to be merciful.
I don't really get how, say, a bullet can cost more than keeping someone in prison for 50 years or so.
WWII war trials were done by the victors. Both the USSR and Nazi Germany committed atrocities and killed millions of people (Stalin was not as picky about his victims though - anyone could be sent to the gulag, starved to death or just shot - it did not depend on being or not being a certain race or ethnicity), however, nobody put Stalin on trial. If the Nazis won the war, the communists would have been on trial.
Even today, what is "legal" is dependent on the government. Whatever Kim does in DPRK is legal in DPRK and if other countries do not like it, they can impose sanctions (which just means that they refuse to trade or reuse to allow entry for certain people) or try to come by force (having nuclear weapons helps to prevent that).
My belief is that criminals should suffer for their crimes and certain crimes (rape and murder for instance) should automatically mean that the perp will never be free again. I think that this is one of very few things the USSR had it right - when you got sent to jail it was not a hotel and you would not get such a nice cell as Breivik - you the conditions were bad and the ones with long prison sentences (or life in prison) were forced to work in dangerous environments (better that criminal dies than a hard working Party loving citizen).
Let me get this straight; you believe that wacky tyrants and horrible despots can write laws at will criminalizing anything they want to; and criminals should suffer for transgressing against the laws.
Basically, that's just a recipe for random torture of random individuals. And you're philosophically OK with it.
So, the person who has shown a willingness to break into a house, tie somebody up, steal their stuff, and then on the way out the door, decide to carve them up to death just for fun, and then hang around until the kids get home from school and kill them too... and then expresses zero remorse for those actions - that's the person you expect to turn back out onto the street for another chance? No? How about in another year? Maybe ten years? What if that person has a history of doing such things repeatedly, and has never shown remorse or any inclination to change his ways? Which new chance is it that you think is going to make that person someone you'd send back out into the world?
What do you know about such things? Do you have any actual experience with such people? Your imaginings exist within your own mind only. For all either of us know, he'll find Jesus in prison and come out and become a priest who works with inner city kids to keep them out of gangs.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I don't like COBOL as a language, never have. I dislike it almost as much as I do Python (for diametrically opposite reasons). Thing is, it has worked for a very long time, and governments around the globe are still using it to this day. I know up here in "where you're moving when Trump wins" Canada, we have a lot of gov't projects to migrate off of old COBOL systems. It's not because the old system is broken: it ain't. It's because the people who can maintain such systems are dying of old age.
It's not a simple matter of watching a Youtube video made by a 12 year old. The language itself is quite simple, it's the fifty years of legacy code that make it a nightmare to find new blood, and the few who can pull it off get to charge whatever they want. On paper, this becomes a steep liability, which is why departments are making the largely financial decision to migrate.
Problem is, governments are legendary at hiring the most incompetent, 7000% over budget, milk-the-cash-cow-dry kind of contractors. Whether it's due to corruption or ineptitude, it's true up here in Apologyland. It's true down there in Gunfreakland. It's probably true across the pond in Thataintfoodland.
Don't blame COBOL, that old dog has done us well for most of our lifetimes. Blame these idiots who can't manage their contractors, and the contractors who can't manage their idiots.
Indeed. An advantage of COBOL is that any shmuck with a minimum of general programming instruction and a good manual can maintain existing code; and it isn't likely to dig into the OS and do serious damage the way erroneous C code, for instance, might.
As you say, the problem is the ancient code with decades of patches of various quality applied and documentation mostly shredded. I've seen code written in "modern" languages within the previous few years which was unmaintainable, mostly because the original specs, if there ever were any, are lost in the mists of time. One particular such is burned into my mind to this day; the correct function of the program depended on a semicolon which should have been there being missing; when that error was fixed, the program always crashed. And it was of such structure that there was no way to despaghetti the code.
Still uses its tongue to lap up water. So, was there a point to this piece of "sheer genius" expressing concern on Cobol. And lest we forget the fun systems run by Fortran.
Reminds me of those people advocating fusion power as just needing more research to become usable. Come on, folks, fusion power is literally billions of years old.
Someone could be making mega bucks to sell them a system that does the same thing. Of course it would be slower, lacking features, years late and way over budget, same as any other modern government software programme
But it would run on your phone, mostly, (presuming your battery didn't run out).
Token-ring on coax? Don't think so.
Looked like coaxial. May have been Type 1 shielded twisted pair cable. That was my first and last time I dealt with Token Ring in the field.
You had token ring? Ha! You had it good! My generation had to deal with Tolkien Ring! On the other hand, it totally ruled. see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If only Americans knew how much of their financial institutions still ran on COBOL, and the outrage that would ensue... ... but seriously, come on. These stories are nothing new, and they'll continue for decades. IT projects are always looked at with a sense of dollars - with band aids being particularly cheap.
Given the 20-28% failure rate of IT projects.... http://my.gartner.com/portal/s...
30+ years ago, I learned a little COBOL (thinking it would get my 15 year old ass a tiny bit of respect from the mainframers). I would never admit it IRL.
In college (decades ago) I listed the languages I could code in for a prof. It tailed off with me looking at the ground and mumbling 'cobol'. The professor noted at the time that everybody who can code in COBOL is embarrassed by that fact.
40+ years ago, I learned a little LISP (thinking it would get my 20 year old ass a tiny bit of respect from the cutting edge developers). 40+ years later, the folks who learned a little COBOL probably have a better chance of getting hired than the folks who learned a little LISP.
"using COBOL" is different from "using compiled code which was originally written in COBOL."
Which is trivial. An isolation switch approaches $0.01 as volume increases.
Indeed. But Joe Home-solarhacker needs to know that he has to hook the thing up.
What's to stop people from creating their own hydrogen at home? Even running the conversion on solar power.
Nothing except cost.
in the near future, you'll be able to sell the oxygen you produce too,
I've never seen one that did that. I'm sure they are out there, but all the "reasonable" ones turn into a pure off-grid system when the grid is down, and when the grid comes back up, will re-link back with it. Meter runs both ways. And when the grid is down, an isolation circuit kicks in and separates you from the grid. Maybe the rules are different where you are, but seems common. I even found a standard for disconnecting a working solar system from a dead grid. DIN VDE 0126.1. Why have a standard on how to do it if it was never done?
As with any kind of emergency generator, for instance, the law requires you to incorporate a system that keeps your generated voltage off the power lines when they are not powered. If you think about the guys who need to fix the lines which are down, it seems reasonable.
*People* never thought is was a good idea: oil and automotive executives do, because hydrogen maintains a gas station-style distribution network. That's why they try so hard to sell it to you.
They hate nothing more than people charging up at home, on their own terms, with the electricity provider of their choosing, possibly with their own solar.
The other thing they like about hydrogen is that it can bridge the gap; burn it in internal combustion engines, then use it in fuel cells for electric vehicles.
A tank of gasoline contains more hydrogen than the equivalent volume of liquid hydrogen. And is a lot easier to deal with.
Emitted a cloud of pollutant under the cover of another's emissions? Often the dog's?
Selling your drug to the citizens of a country that has leadership which performs horrible things or Employing people in a country that has leadership which performs horrible things vs Selling your drug directly to an organisation which will do horrible things with your product. The first part still isn't great, but there's still a world of difference.
Which leads us to "big software companies who have to kowtow to the whims of tyrannies to be allowed to do business with their billions of citizens"
Corporations exist to reduce individual livability & allow a group of people to act as one under the law.
More the latter than the former.
Jeff's construction simply would never have the resources to put together a mega project like a large bridge, skyscraper, or dam, or what if Jeff died midway through the project and the company was dissolved and diluted through his heirs? And is anybody on the hook.. since the construction contract was with Jeff personally and he's dead now...
A corporation exists primarily to allow people to pool capital and provide 'governance' for it that can survive an individual.
Everything else is 2ndary.
Then why do they persist with this limited liability thing if the whole point is to organize massive projects? In China you see executives getting executed all the time for decisions which injure the public, here they lose their jobs, get a golden parachute, and get picked up in another corporate executive job when the fuss dies down,
I do see your point about organizing massive projects needing an actual organization, but the insulation from responsibility is not required for that function.
Is this what you do?
You asked a snarky, ignorant question intended to push some agenda of yours that characterizes the people who own and run businesses as being unable to have feelings. That was an absurd posture on your part. I gave you something to react to. Feel free, instead of resorting to lazy ad hominem, to point out where in the chain of events you just read the transition occurs to the person running a business no longer being able to have feelings. Be specific, or consider no longer trying to paint that whiny Corporations Are Evil Robots image you were lamely hoping to get across.
If you think a corporation like Pfizer is comparable to any small business you have a serious problem with your ability to think
So, at what point do the people running the business stop being people? Be specific. Is it when the company is made of 2 people? 20? 200? 2,000? 20,000? Be specific about the number, and by what mechanism you think that the people making the decisions are no longer themselves, no longer able to consider their values, and no longer have feelings. Explain why one person LESS than the size you think is some robotic non-feeling entity is still able to have feelings, but one person MORE than that number no longer is. Talk about what happens when that one extra person comes on board. No, really. See if you can coherently explain your theory, and how it applies to one person more, and less than the number that you think scales human decision making from one mode to another. The truth is, you don't even know anybody who has successfully launched and grown a business to the point where there are hundreds or thousands of people involved. Because you can't rely on a personal experience of having sat down and actually talked to someone like that, you're conjuring up a fantasy notion of who they become, so that you have something abstract to hate, since that what makes you tick. That whole "get help" BS? It's called "projection," dude. Look it up.
You mean, like would a corporation hypothetically produce cars that don't meet mandated emission standards and tweak the software to game the testing, and flounder around trying to find who is responsible for making that decision? Can't happen! Just because it's a Limited Liability Corporation doesn't mean the individuals who decide "We must produce a car with this basic design that meets the standards and I won't take no for an answer" and the guy trying to implement the decision who realizes "If this is doable it's not doable by this company, what was that Kobayashi Maru thing again?" might each feel like they're only doing what they have to do and neither foresees the end result, let alone takes full responsibility for it, the way either of them would if he was the only person in charge of running the operation, designing the car, building it, and testing it.
You might want to look up "recidivism" in a dictionary, and then maybe some research into the "recidivism rate", which is not zero.
In a universe that contains "recidivism", but does not contain "zombie crime spree", execution must, by the definitions of the words involved, deter and prevent crime.
Q.E.D.
Except where the existence of the death penalty has a causative effect on the murder rate. For instance, where the perp recognizes that he has to kill all the witnesses so he won't get the death penalty after one person gets killed. Or where they decide the best approach is to kill everybody up front so as to reduce the odds something goes real wrong during the crime and they end up captured and on death row. Or they get the clear message that it's ok to kill people who deserve it, and they can think of a few. Etc etc etc. See also "Why you can't end terrorism by just killing all the terrorists"
Except, of course, capital punishment isn't actually a deterrents.
It's vengeance, pure and simple, and while I understand why people want it, if it is going to continue, it shouldn't be wrapped up in the language of crime prevention, because it doesn't prevent crimes. Allowing capital punishment to be justified in this way is simply a way to make it more palatable, and state-sanctioned killings should be anything but palatable.
Whether anyone is deterred by the possibility of a State Execution while contemplating an act that carries the Capital Punishment is debatable, once on Death Row they sure try mighty hard to get stay alive
Judging from the last few such cases here in Connecticut, they seem to request an end to appeals and that they be put to death at least as often as they try to get out of it.
Nice theory, but the way people make decisions is pretty complex and influenced by many factors. Research does not support your conclusion: https://www.dartmouth.edu/~cha...
If the death penalty was an effective rational deterrent to murder, then the death rate from automotive travel would put the auto manufacturers out of business. The fact is the risk assessment gadget in people's brains is one of God's crappiest products ever.
Do you really think a mugger or whatever is thinking that far ahead? Sure, it's going to stop the honest people who consider their actions and consequences but they already have plenty of things to stop them. Criminals have a bad habit of not doing what they are told to do so your "sending a message" is unlikely to work. Maybe those "flower child researchers", some of who served in Korea and Vietnam, fit your definition of "a real man" more than any of the readers of this website and thus did not arrive at "flower child conclusions". Criminology isn't for the faint of heart after all.
Considering how many murders are crimes of passion where the cops arrive and find the killer standing there over the body with the weapon still in his hand, having made no effort to evade capture or cover up his guilt at all.
In the 1970's, the flower child generation spawned flower child researchers who used social "science" to arrive at flower child conclusions that they wanted. We are still feeling the effects of this bad research in many areas. This era was the plague that will not go away. Many of these are often discussed on these forums, I am looking at your gender wage discrepancy. There are many others. If you stop and use the smell test a bit, tie to you own life. Threat of punishment is always in the calculus of a crime. If you steal that post it note, and the worst you get is a cold hard stare from an HR lady, you may do it. If it leads to your immediate termination, you leave that note the hell alone. The death penalty will not deter a crime of passion. That is absolutely true. However, if you are thinking about murder, and you start imagining the needle is waiting for you.... Its a little different. Anyways, people resist these old studies, and they often find different conclusions. Here is one on this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Yeah, I remember when Connecticut did away with the death penalty a few years back. Like everyone, I had been planning to kill a bunch of people but it was such a pain to get them on a bus and take them to Massachusetts or Rhode Island or someplace else without the death penalty; but now I can kill them right here at home, so much more tempting.
Not this case, there are many ways to kill people, none of them are humane... Capital punishment is widely considered cruel and inhuman punishment in violation of the human rights convention. The US and Japan is the last western countries to maintain this barbaric practice... No, I think it's alright for companies to stand up against this issue.. Seriously, European countries have threaten local companies that they could face criminal charges if they exported drugs intended to murder people. I'm not even sure that's so far fetched, when capital punishment is seen as a human rights violation, why shouldn't your company be held responsible for murder, if you export drugs for such purposes.
If they want to use the medical industry to execute prisoners, just admit them to hospitals for a while until they get a hospital-acquired infection. UTI, clostridium, pneumonia, RIP. Works for non-prisoners, don't see why it wouldn't work for prisoners.
I've never gotten the reason for a lethal injection or some of the more exotic forms of execution. Strapping someone to a gurney and fiddling around for 20 minutes trying to find the veins to inject drugs and then watching for another 30 as they thrash around because it was botched is supposed to be "humane".
If a state was being "humane" it wouldn't execute people in the first place. And that being so it should just drop the pretense and shoot them. Shoot them in the heart and they'll rapidly lose consciousness and die. It's quick, it's effective, it's cheap. And it could be done in a way that doesn't require a human firing squad if that's a concern.
Like going to the doctor to get a shot to make you healthy isn't aversive to the average person; getting an IV to kill you is supposed to be merciful.
I don't really get how, say, a bullet can cost more than keeping someone in prison for 50 years or so.
WWII war trials were done by the victors. Both the USSR and Nazi Germany committed atrocities and killed millions of people (Stalin was not as picky about his victims though - anyone could be sent to the gulag, starved to death or just shot - it did not depend on being or not being a certain race or ethnicity), however, nobody put Stalin on trial. If the Nazis won the war, the communists would have been on trial.
Even today, what is "legal" is dependent on the government. Whatever Kim does in DPRK is legal in DPRK and if other countries do not like it, they can impose sanctions (which just means that they refuse to trade or reuse to allow entry for certain people) or try to come by force (having nuclear weapons helps to prevent that).
My belief is that criminals should suffer for their crimes and certain crimes (rape and murder for instance) should automatically mean that the perp will never be free again. I think that this is one of very few things the USSR had it right - when you got sent to jail it was not a hotel and you would not get such a nice cell as Breivik - you the conditions were bad and the ones with long prison sentences (or life in prison) were forced to work in dangerous environments (better that criminal dies than a hard working Party loving citizen).
Let me get this straight; you believe that wacky tyrants and horrible despots can write laws at will criminalizing anything they want to; and criminals should suffer for transgressing against the laws. Basically, that's just a recipe for random torture of random individuals. And you're philosophically OK with it.
So, the person who has shown a willingness to break into a house, tie somebody up, steal their stuff, and then on the way out the door, decide to carve them up to death just for fun, and then hang around until the kids get home from school and kill them too ... and then expresses zero remorse for those actions - that's the person you expect to turn back out onto the street for another chance? No? How about in another year? Maybe ten years? What if that person has a history of doing such things repeatedly, and has never shown remorse or any inclination to change his ways? Which new chance is it that you think is going to make that person someone you'd send back out into the world?
What do you know about such things? Do you have any actual experience with such people? Your imaginings exist within your own mind only. For all either of us know, he'll find Jesus in prison and come out and become a priest who works with inner city kids to keep them out of gangs.