It's actually about giving the rest of society an incentive to not engage in the same crimes for which someone else was found guilty.
No it isn't. The US has gone WAY beyond the level of penalties that have a beneficial effect in deterring crime. The US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation and yet it doesn't have lower crime rates. In fact the US has HIGHER rates of several types of violent crimes. No, the penalties that are handed out and conditions of the prisons has everything to do with politics and very little to do with crime prevention. Being "tough on crime" gets votes regardless of the effectiveness or morality of the actions that result.
Just like the police do not come until a crime is happening, or after the fact, a disincentive can not be given until someone is judged guilty by a jury of their peers.
Police routinely show up in places where a crime is reasonably likely to occur. Police being present in a location with no crime being committed mostly makes it less likely that a crime will occur. Happens all the time.
Handing out increasingly disproportional punishments for crimes does nothing to improve deterrence of crimes further.
The police are not there to save you from a crime, they are there to clean up after the fact.
Incorrect. They are there for both purposes. Police are both a deterrent and and enforcement mechanism.
In considering our incarceration situation one must, like when considering our healthcare situation, consider the fact that we do both on a for-profit basis; and thus, actually reducing the rate of people who need either would wreck everything.
At best it might be a brain dead shell, but most likely they will find that there is something quintessential about life that will prevent a truely synthetic organism from ever having that "spark" we call life.
Cool, I saw that movie too, bro.
OTOH, if nature can do it via evolution, nature can do it via human bioengineering.
Gonna change the nature of biology graduate school, totally.
The Right To Life types will go absolutely berserk over this. The whole religious underpinning of the movement...the one they never like to talk about...will have to decide whether a human created by man should enjoy the same protection as a human created by their god.
And when there's no sperm and egg union to enshrine as the moment when life begins, where will they draw the line? At what point during the assembly process does the thing in the dish deserve to be called human? A chimp shares all but 4% of our DNA, after all.
This should be fun!
As Dr. Frankenstein said to Igor, "If this thing works we won't need women any more".
It wouldn't be hard to engineer night vision. The hardest part to that is engineeerin the changes to the lense to allow in UV. We've evolved to block UV in the lense, so as to protect our cornea, but engineering humans to be penta-chromats (we already have tetra-chromats, just rare), and have the 5th be in the UV spectrum. You'd need to have sunglasses, or UV blocking contact lenses, but at night, the glow in the atmosphere would give a pretty reasonable night vision.
Night vision has nothing to do with UV light perception. (UV comes from the sun, just like most of the rest of light. There isn't an atmospheric night-glow of UV, but there might be some UV from starlight.) Our cornea is on the outside and blocks UV, so that it isn't absorbed in the lens (which makes it become cloudy and you blind).
As a side note, you can already see UV light. You just see it as an uncolored brightness instead of a specific color.
Right, like we shouldn't shield ourselves from the elements with things like clothes and houses. After all, if evolution couldn't solve the problem, it'd be pure hubris for us to address it directly ourselves.
Fix all evolution's mistakes. Give us a furry coat to shield us from the elements. Have us use all 4 limbs to reduce the strain on our spines. Eliminate the modifications to our throat which allow us to modify our vocalizations, but at the cost of higher rate of choking on food. Reduce the size of the brain so that cranial size can be smaller and all that trouble with giving birth is eliminated. Maybe add a tail for counterbalancing to improve our rapid mobility.
The 6 day time frame was just to restore Earth to a habitable state again and repopulate it after He wiped out Lucifer's kingdom by a flood. That said, not having a committee to deal with or regulations to adhere to was probably a time saver. The next judgment is also going to be apocalyptic.
Pretty clear when He was getting towards the end, creating humans, He was pretty much just cutting corners and trying to get it wrapped up before the weekend.
Sounds like fun. Build the ideal human, including genetic resistance to all known diseases, building in an ideal weight, and heart rate that's lower, and eliminating as many issues of aging as possible. Maximum intellect, earliest possible puberty, and maximize the utility of the person. The design goals are obvious enough.
But building a person one molecule at a time in committee? If it took them one minute per molecule, and they worked 8 hour days, 5 days a week, it's take them 24,000 years to assemble a human. If they worked 24/7, it'd take them only 6000 years. So they'd only need 24,000 committees working in parallel to complete this in one year (8 by 5) So far, leaking at 100% from meetings, it'd likely not be secret for long.
And when it's done..... it turns out to be Donald Trump! AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!
<quote>"In the past three years, the TSA and Congress cut the number of front-line screeners by 4,622 -- or about 10% -- on expectations that an expedited screening program called PreCheck would speed up the lines. However, not enough people enrolled for TSA to realize the anticipated efficiencies."</quote>
So, really, this was just congress cooking the books with the budget by cutting something that would have to be restored. PreCheck (or, rather, the Trusted Traveler programs that give you access to PreCheck) require an in-person interview. Last time I checked, the next available appointment at SFO (the only location for this in the Bay Area) was November! Plenty of people have signed up, but there isn't enough capacity to process the applications.
Congress should have realized that enrolling millions of people in a new program would require significant funding.
They haven't even figured out that battling Zika virus is going to cost a couple of billion dollars. These are the same folks who bludgeoned Obama for not responding enough to Ebola.
I'm also pleased to announce that, in addition to there being 10 longest featured articles, there are also 10 shortest featured articles. There are 10 longest non-featured articles and 10 shortest non-featured articles too. There are 10 articles with the most pictures, and I would dare say there are at least 10 articles without any pictures at all! There are 10 articles containing the longest average word length, and 10 articles containing the shortest average word length. And, if you find all that fascinating, there are also 10 articles with the most edits, and 10 articles with the least edits.
I'm most interested in the shortest of the longest five of the shortest ten articles.
Well, with the risk of continuing the trend, it's not size what always matters most (I see a commenter there talks likewise about length).
Sometimes articles bring essential facts -- e.g. a graph depicting the various resolutions according to their aspects, or a comparison of office suites so that we can judge them based on some personal need (again, *sigh*, it was size: I needed to find a lighter alternative to Libreoffice).
Also, all these articles seem to be in the English Wikipedia. While arguably having most of the longer topics, it is possible that a non-English article in another language's Wikipedia hold the "record" by being the longest (again, not a virtue by itself).
Perhaps a better metric would be a like button or "was this useful? yes / no" toggle at the margin of the article...
but how would you compare the length of an article in English to that of one in Chinese, for instance?
I stumbled across the History of Poland (actually, the early history, to begin with) after investigating the supposed nationality of Captain Nemo. The Jules Verne article (or was it the '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' article?) mentioned that he originally intended that Nemo was Polish nobility, upset that his nation had been wiped off the map and remained so for almost a hundred years. His editor insisted that he change it because it reflected poorly on Russia, who France was trying to maintain a peace treaty (and where he hoped to sell translation of the book). "What remained in the book from the initial concept is a portrait of Tadeusz Kociuszko, a Polish national hero, leader of the uprising against Russia in 1794, with an inscription in Latin: "Finis Poloniae!" ("The end of Poland!")."
I started researching the January Uprising and then earlier uprisings and then back to the founding of Poland.
The whole story is simply amazing. They invented public education (for the middle and upper classes) before anyone else had, and just the idea that the national government operated out of the Hotel Lambert in Paris for many decades. Every few decades the story takes another amazing turn. I was fascinated!!
You want to talk about being way ahead of the rest of the world in political system, check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
And I demand the right to cure my children by torturing their bodies until the demons possessing them flee back to Hell. Which one of you idiots gets to get shot trying to stop me?
Joke all you like, but you're closer to the truth than you think...
Read up on "Faith Healing" and the states that allow parents to withhold medical care for their children and provides immunity to charges for abuse or neglect, even if the child dies due to lack of medical care.
Indeed. There's a fuzzy line between freedom of religion and child neglect. Jehovah's Witnesses and their attitude re transfusions, for example. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08... and http://news.discovery.com/huma... for another.
kind of goes along with the "spare the rod and spoil the child" school of child abuse. sorry, child rearing.
My grandfather is going to throw a party once polio is officially eliminated.
How long have we been vaccinating against polio and it still isn't officially eliminated? It sure looks like the mass vaccinations are not working to "officially eliminate" anything.
Because superstitious uneducated villagers resist vaccination in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and the United States.
Our kids might be the last that have to be vaccinated for polio.
The first kid that isn't vaccinated against polio is taking the lives of every other child they contact into their hands. That's the argument the mandatory vaccination proponents use.
The reality is, an un-vaccinated child is no threat to others, because the others have been vaccinated to prevent them from contracting that disease. Either vaccinations protect people from getting a disease or they don't. You can't argue that one child can spread death to all his vaccinated neighbors with one voice, and then argue that vaccinating him will prevent him from getting, and carrying, that same disease with another.
And sorry, but the word "freedom" means that not everyone must do everything science tells them is good and right, and that will do the most good for society as a whole.
Like stopping for red lights. That's the nanny state telling me what to do, and this tyranny will not stand!!!
Slashdot Mirror
New job opportunity: unemployed actors pick up gigs by simulating painful execution for public consumption.
It's actually about giving the rest of society an incentive to not engage in the same crimes for which someone else was found guilty.
No it isn't. The US has gone WAY beyond the level of penalties that have a beneficial effect in deterring crime. The US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation and yet it doesn't have lower crime rates. In fact the US has HIGHER rates of several types of violent crimes. No, the penalties that are handed out and conditions of the prisons has everything to do with politics and very little to do with crime prevention. Being "tough on crime" gets votes regardless of the effectiveness or morality of the actions that result.
Just like the police do not come until a crime is happening, or after the fact, a disincentive can not be given until someone is judged guilty by a jury of their peers.
Police routinely show up in places where a crime is reasonably likely to occur. Police being present in a location with no crime being committed mostly makes it less likely that a crime will occur. Happens all the time.
Handing out increasingly disproportional punishments for crimes does nothing to improve deterrence of crimes further.
The police are not there to save you from a crime, they are there to clean up after the fact.
Incorrect. They are there for both purposes. Police are both a deterrent and and enforcement mechanism.
In considering our incarceration situation one must, like when considering our healthcare situation, consider the fact that we do both on a for-profit basis; and thus, actually reducing the rate of people who need either would wreck everything.
Well, the closest thing to it that Wikipedia is that he's bi-polar. Does that count?
Even better; imagine a genetically engineered Jean Claude Van Damme bipolar bear! Awesome!
Republicans hate science unless it can be used as a weapon.
Corollary: you can use anything as a weapon if you try hard enough.
Take note of it.
YOU live in the age that will see the first bronie fuck a lab created MLP life form.
and it will be an artificial white rat.
HEY! That's marvelous. They're going to create a human without original sin! And therefore no need for salvation.
Not thinking forwards enough. Artificial person; no parents; no inheritance; another damn welfare brat!!! President Trump, outlaw this!!
At best it might be a brain dead shell, but most likely they will find that there is something quintessential about life that will prevent a truely synthetic organism from ever having that "spark" we call life.
Cool, I saw that movie too, bro. OTOH, if nature can do it via evolution, nature can do it via human bioengineering.
Gonna change the nature of biology graduate school, totally.
The Right To Life types will go absolutely berserk over this. The whole religious underpinning of the movement...the one they never like to talk about...will have to decide whether a human created by man should enjoy the same protection as a human created by their god.
And when there's no sperm and egg union to enshrine as the moment when life begins, where will they draw the line? At what point during the assembly process does the thing in the dish deserve to be called human? A chimp shares all but 4% of our DNA, after all.
This should be fun!
As Dr. Frankenstein said to Igor, "If this thing works we won't need women any more".
It's often (especially in controversial cases like this) easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
That's how religion works.
Why is this being done in secret? Why not be open about your plans? What is there to hide about science?
They were meeting with the Climatologists' Cartel.
It wouldn't be hard to engineer night vision. The hardest part to that is engineeerin the changes to the lense to allow in UV. We've evolved to block UV in the lense, so as to protect our cornea, but engineering humans to be penta-chromats (we already have tetra-chromats, just rare), and have the 5th be in the UV spectrum. You'd need to have sunglasses, or UV blocking contact lenses, but at night, the glow in the atmosphere would give a pretty reasonable night vision.
Night vision has nothing to do with UV light perception. (UV comes from the sun, just like most of the rest of light. There isn't an atmospheric night-glow of UV, but there might be some UV from starlight.) Our cornea is on the outside and blocks UV, so that it isn't absorbed in the lens (which makes it become cloudy and you blind).
As a side note, you can already see UV light. You just see it as an uncolored brightness instead of a specific color.
wouldn't IR be better?
Right, like we shouldn't shield ourselves from the elements with things like clothes and houses. After all, if evolution couldn't solve the problem, it'd be pure hubris for us to address it directly ourselves.
Fix all evolution's mistakes. Give us a furry coat to shield us from the elements. Have us use all 4 limbs to reduce the strain on our spines. Eliminate the modifications to our throat which allow us to modify our vocalizations, but at the cost of higher rate of choking on food. Reduce the size of the brain so that cranial size can be smaller and all that trouble with giving birth is eliminated. Maybe add a tail for counterbalancing to improve our rapid mobility.
The 6 day time frame was just to restore Earth to a habitable state again and repopulate it after He wiped out Lucifer's kingdom by a flood. That said, not having a committee to deal with or regulations to adhere to was probably a time saver. The next judgment is also going to be apocalyptic.
Pretty clear when He was getting towards the end, creating humans, He was pretty much just cutting corners and trying to get it wrapped up before the weekend.
Sounds like fun. Build the ideal human, including genetic resistance to all known diseases, building in an ideal weight, and heart rate that's lower, and eliminating as many issues of aging as possible. Maximum intellect, earliest possible puberty, and maximize the utility of the person. The design goals are obvious enough. But building a person one molecule at a time in committee? If it took them one minute per molecule, and they worked 8 hour days, 5 days a week, it's take them 24,000 years to assemble a human. If they worked 24/7, it'd take them only 6000 years. So they'd only need 24,000 committees working in parallel to complete this in one year (8 by 5) So far, leaking at 100% from meetings, it'd likely not be secret for long.
And when it's done..... it turns out to be Donald Trump! AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!
<quote>"In the past three years, the TSA and Congress cut the number of front-line screeners by 4,622 -- or about 10% -- on expectations that an expedited screening program called PreCheck would speed up the lines. However, not enough people enrolled for TSA to realize the anticipated efficiencies."</quote> So, really, this was just congress cooking the books with the budget by cutting something that would have to be restored. PreCheck (or, rather, the Trusted Traveler programs that give you access to PreCheck) require an in-person interview. Last time I checked, the next available appointment at SFO (the only location for this in the Bay Area) was November! Plenty of people have signed up, but there isn't enough capacity to process the applications. Congress should have realized that enrolling millions of people in a new program would require significant funding.
They haven't even figured out that battling Zika virus is going to cost a couple of billion dollars. These are the same folks who bludgeoned Obama for not responding enough to Ebola.
I shall do just that, during the ample time for contemplation afforded by the longer lines.
Just make sure you get to the airport early (12 hours before takeoff should be about right) and enjoy a leisurely day in the TSA line.
President Trump will see this as an opportunity to reduce the deficit by selling snacks and drinks to those in line. Trump brand, of course.
Worst form of meditation ever.
I'm also pleased to announce that, in addition to there being 10 longest featured articles, there are also 10 shortest featured articles. There are 10 longest non-featured articles and 10 shortest non-featured articles too. There are 10 articles with the most pictures, and I would dare say there are at least 10 articles without any pictures at all! There are 10 articles containing the longest average word length, and 10 articles containing the shortest average word length. And, if you find all that fascinating, there are also 10 articles with the most edits, and 10 articles with the least edits.
I'm most interested in the shortest of the longest five of the shortest ten articles.
Hi, on wikis this button is called 'edit'.
Sites with 'was this useful' buttons are full of shit and cannot be edited by anonymous cowards.
Why does it matter what matters?
They just presented a list with the longest articles, nothing else.
Wikipedia and lists are like America and food.
Even as AC!
Well, with the risk of continuing the trend, it's not size what always matters most (I see a commenter there talks likewise about length).
Sometimes articles bring essential facts -- e.g. a graph depicting the various resolutions according to their aspects, or a comparison of office suites so that we can judge them based on some personal need (again, *sigh*, it was size: I needed to find a lighter alternative to Libreoffice).
Also, all these articles seem to be in the English Wikipedia. While arguably having most of the longer topics, it is possible that a non-English article in another language's Wikipedia hold the "record" by being the longest (again, not a virtue by itself).
Perhaps a better metric would be a like button or "was this useful? yes / no" toggle at the margin of the article...
but how would you compare the length of an article in English to that of one in Chinese, for instance?
towards the end there, he was also physically bigger than Poland and the entire Maya civilization!
mod up mod up mod up mod up
Pity your knowledge of plumbing and driving didn't.
And yet, they never solved the problem of periodic maintenance of illumination fixtures without excessive staffing requirements.
I stumbled across the History of Poland (actually, the early history, to begin with) after investigating the supposed nationality of Captain Nemo. The Jules Verne article (or was it the '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' article?) mentioned that he originally intended that Nemo was Polish nobility, upset that his nation had been wiped off the map and remained so for almost a hundred years. His editor insisted that he change it because it reflected poorly on Russia, who France was trying to maintain a peace treaty (and where he hoped to sell translation of the book). "What remained in the book from the initial concept is a portrait of Tadeusz Kociuszko, a Polish national hero, leader of the uprising against Russia in 1794, with an inscription in Latin: "Finis Poloniae!" ("The end of Poland!")." I started researching the January Uprising and then earlier uprisings and then back to the founding of Poland. The whole story is simply amazing. They invented public education (for the middle and upper classes) before anyone else had, and just the idea that the national government operated out of the Hotel Lambert in Paris for many decades. Every few decades the story takes another amazing turn. I was fascinated!!
You want to talk about being way ahead of the rest of the world in political system, check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
And I demand the right to cure my children by torturing their bodies until the demons possessing them flee back to Hell. Which one of you idiots gets to get shot trying to stop me?
Joke all you like, but you're closer to the truth than you think...
Read up on "Faith Healing" and the states that allow parents to withhold medical care for their children and provides immunity to charges for abuse or neglect, even if the child dies due to lack of medical care.
Indeed. There's a fuzzy line between freedom of religion and child neglect. Jehovah's Witnesses and their attitude re transfusions, for example. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08... and http://news.discovery.com/huma... for another. kind of goes along with the "spare the rod and spoil the child" school of child abuse. sorry, child rearing.
My grandfather is going to throw a party once polio is officially eliminated.
How long have we been vaccinating against polio and it still isn't officially eliminated? It sure looks like the mass vaccinations are not working to "officially eliminate" anything.
Because superstitious uneducated villagers resist vaccination in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and the United States.
That's ok, because they weren't intended to.
Seriously? That's your official position? http://polioeradication.org/me...
http://www.globalhealthstrateg...
Our kids might be the last that have to be vaccinated for polio.
The first kid that isn't vaccinated against polio is taking the lives of every other child they contact into their hands. That's the argument the mandatory vaccination proponents use.
The reality is, an un-vaccinated child is no threat to others, because the others have been vaccinated to prevent them from contracting that disease. Either vaccinations protect people from getting a disease or they don't. You can't argue that one child can spread death to all his vaccinated neighbors with one voice, and then argue that vaccinating him will prevent him from getting, and carrying, that same disease with another.
And sorry, but the word "freedom" means that not everyone must do everything science tells them is good and right, and that will do the most good for society as a whole.
Like stopping for red lights. That's the nanny state telling me what to do, and this tyranny will not stand!!!