But he said, "It doesn't matter what people say, you can't let yourself catch on fire without trying to get away. And you can sit and say every day, I would burn up before I let my kids die in a fire," he said, "it's not humanly possible."
He also left his children to burn to death in a house fire, thinking only about saving his own ass. So, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for him. If my daughter was in a burning house, I would run into it to save her, even at the threat of my own life.
You've never been near a major fire. It's not the abstract "threat" of possible death that stops you... It's the insane heat, guaranteed 3rd degree burns over your entire body in seconds even several feet away from the flames if you don't have fire fighter's protective gear, that most people can't possibly imagine until they've been up-close and personal with it.
Pour gasoline over your entire body, and light yourself on fire. Then spend two minutes doing any mundane task, without making any move to extinguish the fire and your melting skin the whole time. That's what running into a burning building is like. If you can't successfully overcome the urge to extinguish yourself while engulfed in flames, you wouldn't be able to overcome your body's overwhelming instinct to stops you dead in your tracks from running into a house fire. It's not like the movies.
saving his own ass. So, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for him.
That's a pretty fucked-up view. While we all hope to be macho and heroic when it really matters, a guy falling just a bit short, sure as hell doesn't deserve to be killed for it.
But how did they never test those theories before? Not just that local fire department, but at several fire departments all across the country, years earlier, and publish the findings so everyone else would know they were wrong in so many ways. I know they do controlled burns, so why didn't they know for sure the difference in how glass crazes and cracks from slow or fast fires? Or how fire leaves marks on the floor similar to having gasoline poured on the floor and lit?
This entire topic... the problem with forensic "science," was explained extremely well two years ago by Frontline, Episode "The Real CSI". Viewable on their website:
SPOILER: The upshot is, forensics aren't a science. They were conceived and perpetuated by law enforcement agencies, and have NO theoretical basis, nor standards for the procedures, nor the individuals who are certified as experts. Even something basic like finger prints aren't unique at all, everyone always just assumed they were.
I don't think justice systems are accurate enough to bet human lives on.
I HATE people who think that execution is inhumane, but locking someone away in a tiny prison cell with a large pool of violent and hardened criminals for decades is perfectly fine... "No harm done!"
If the justice system isn't accurate enough to allow executions, then it's not accurate enough to allow any long-term incarceration or punishment, either.
Secondly, what about the estimated 4% of people on death row who are innocent.
Sitting "on death row" is no different than going to prison. You seem to be implying 4.1% of the executed are innocent, but that's not what the number means at all!
That 4.1% figure comes from the percentage of those on death row, who are exonerated in the NORMAL appeals process. In other words, they are not executed. It's a reassuringly-low false-conviction rate to begin with, and an example of the system WORKING AS DESIGNED, as they are all released.
They sometimes sit in jail for decades trying to get cleared.
Eliminating the death penalty will NOT help this at all.
In fact, it will make matters worse, as the same study determined that "resentenced defendants are eight times less likely to be exonerated than those on death row."
Sometimes they do (having lost years/decades of their life), sometimes they don't (cleared after they die in jail or are executed).
The same study you cited says you're wrong:
"once someone is executed, dies of natural causes, or commits suicide, the chance of being exonerated drops to nearly zero."
In other words, no, it essentially doesn't happen.
Furthermore, last time I checked, not a single condemned person in the US has been exonerated after execution, ever since the death penalty was suspended/reinstated (in 1976). Unless there's been recent news on that front, you can't cite a single one.
Better to keep a guilty person alive and in jail than to execute an innocent.
I don't agree. Leaving an innocent person to rot in a cell for decades is every bit as inhumane as execution, if not more-so. Removing the threat of the death penalty would allow our judicial system to get far more sloppy, and would remove the last reason for someone with a life sentence not to murder guards or other inmates, with no real consequences.
Actually, there have been a few people executed that were proven innocent posthumously.
I'm not aware of a single one in the US ever since the death penalty was suspended/reinstated (1976). If there has been a new development on that front, please point me to it.
Life is sacred, which is why the Republican platform has, up until now, held that abortion is evil.
You have a good point. While generally opposed to abortion, I will support its use in any case where the fetus has been convicted of a capital crime, in a court of law.
I'm fairly certain repurposing the chamber would be nothing more than execution theater. A nitrogen tank and a simple hospital mask for the condemned are all that's required. That's the point: the gas is inert.
You REALLY haven't thought this through... there's a million and one things that have to be considered and designed-in to prevent accidents and ensure everything goes right.
You need a big room with lots of air flow, sensors/alarms, just to ensure the safety of the personnel, should something spring a leak, or rupture. You need impressive and strong restraints holding the convict, since they're going to be big powerful men, struggling for their lives before, during, and shortly after.
Your "hospital mask" needs to be something that absolutely, positively can't be removed, disconnected, disabled, rendered partially functional, etc., by the thrashing and struggling convict.
Worst case scenario would be that the condemned gets asphyxiated for several minutes, long enough to cause severe brain damage, but then a convulsion breaks the seal and allows air to leak-in, releasing all the gas with the man's heart and vital organs still working. Lots of effort needs to go into ensuring that can't ever possibly happen, and a half-assed improvised setup isn't ever going to be up to the task.
Considering all the many ways it could go wrong, I wouldn't go with anything less than a gas chamber for performing such a task. Those who have them would need them tested out and repaired after decades of retirement. Those who don't would need to have them built.
Here in the US, we don't believe in guilt by association.
Actually, instead of lagging, I'd say the US is leading the western world. Executions were stopped for several years, and the US is becoming the model for how they can be reintroduced and used in a more modern world. The only question is how long it will take until the EU follows the US' lead...
The "peer pressure" argument falls flat on its face when you look through the past century, and see how much of the world quickly adopted some policy based on a new sociological fad, only to reverse it after people realized that it really didn't have any basis at all.
For example, how many countries began pilot programs for forced sterilization of the poor and infirm (eugenics) in the 1930s? The US was surely lagging behind on that, too.
in the early decades of the 20th century [...] eugenics was practiced around the world and was promoted by governments, and influential individuals and institutions. Many countries enacted[11] various eugenics policies and programmes, including: genetic screening, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and segregation of the mentally ill from the rest of the population), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies, and genocide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We're just lucky that eugenics got quickly Godwin'd, and quickly went away. Perhaps lifetime imprisonment will go the same way. After all, it's patently absurd to call execution inhumane, and promoting decade after decade of imprisonment... especially segregated or solitary confinement.
Many of the best commentators from here are also active there, so there's plenty of insightful comments. The overall volume is just low because of recent events.
It got a lot of comments when it was first unveiled, but a bit of drama with the operators that kept making it to the front page, combined with a determination to post more frequent stories than anyone wants, seems to have taken the shine off, and scared plenty of early-adopters away.
Whether it rebounds back to it's path of world domination, or backslides into the abyss, remains to be seen. I remain hopeful.
There was a guy on NPR a while back who was talking about how the number of accidents per year hasn't gone down in a generation or two; completely ignoring how much population has increase
You don't need to consider population. The number of traffic fatalities has gone down DRAMATICALLY over the past two decades.
"1979 to 2005, the number of deaths per year decreased 14.97% while the number of deaths per capita decreased by 35.46%."
1. USPS is rarely less expensive sending packages than FedEx or UPS.
That was true a few years ago, but no longer. They've updated their antiquated parcel rates, and now they're faster and cheaper. Or look at a cheap retailer like Amazon, who uses USPS extensively.
Cheap services from FedEx / UPS (like "Smart Post") are just piggybacking on the USPS, anyhow, and will be delivered by your postal carrier.
2. USPS has slower delivery times than FedEx or UPS.
Not true anymore. Their "Express Mail" service is usually just as cheap as the old "Parcel Post" option, with fast delivery (usually 1-3 days).
3. USPS has a much higher rate of package damage than FedEx or UPS.
Source?
4. USPS has a generally less helpful and less polite staff in the offices than FedEx or UPS.
I've never had a problem with USPS staff. And Fedex and UPS offices are usually MIA... You're lucky if there's one within an hour's drive from you. And don't be surprised if they're closed half the day, or if the nearest one doesn't handle home deliveries, so you need to drive to an even-more distant one to pick up a package.
Meanwhile, there's a post office in every city, if not more than one, open for full business hours and Saturdays, and staffed by multiple people all the time.
UPS charges extra for Saturday delivery, and will charge you if you want to pick up your package at a UPS Store instead of taking a day off work, or driving 5 cities over to the office, in the hour after you get off of work, but before they close...
Fedex is slightly better, with Tues-Sat deliveries standard. But the USPS has always done that, and they're even doing *Sunday* deliveries for Amazon.
I paid for it. I dug the hold. I set the post. I poured the concrete. It's my mailbox.
And it's located on a public right-of-way, next to the road, NOT on your property (usually).
Except human trials have found women feel more relaxed around sweaty, smelly men who don't wear deodorant (or just their dirty shirts). Pheremones are important.
I imagine female mice don't have the same reaction to male pheremones.
if this dad asked for help to rescue his daughter by force, I will tell you there are quite a few of us ready to come up to Mass and pledge our rifles if need be.
I'm sure... The crazies always seem to attract more crazies:
we've used up all of the "easy resources" on the planet.
As long as the Earth doesn't turn into Pluto, we've got astronomical amounts out easily accessible solar power.
The major elements that make up our modern world are ridiculously abundant. Silicon, iron and aluminum are #2, #3 and #4. We aren't ever going to run out of them, and we need little more than those to restart the industrial revolution from scratch.
that would still mean there have been billions of years, for billions of civilizations to arise, and of those billions, perhaps tens of thousands survived to colonize space.
It's purely wishful thinking that there are many others out there. The Drake equation has many variables which we can't begin to ball-park...
Just how likely is life to arise? How likely is it to evolve into complex organisms? How likely is it that it develops into sentient beings?
With our single sample, and far too little knowledge about how it happened, nobody can even making a GUESS about what numbers to fill-in for the above... it's just a completely baseless wild assumption. Dogma and wishful thinking only minimally disguised as science.
People's desires for there to be a deus ex out there, which will swoop in at any moment, and solve all our hard problems for us, seems to overwhelm all logic and rigor.
OpenWRT has packages for damn near every Linux program, which you can run on your router... You can even install devel packages and compile it yourself.
http://www.dnsdynamic.org/ pledges to be free, forever. Plus I like their tftpd.net domain. Asus's DDNS is a commercial product, and certainly has no such pledge, so they're pretty damn sure to go the way of dyndns.
It fascinates me how many people here on Slashdot have significant experience using axes.
And what were YOU planning on using to protect yourself during the zombie apocalypse? Ammo is gonna get scarce, and swords are more expensive and less damaging.
given how laborious and difficult an actual english degree is and how high the failure rate is, saying that CS has more 'rigor in thinking' and 'challenging' is laughable.
Swinging a sledge hammer is laborious.
Community colleges have astronomically high failure rates. That doesn't mean their courses are harder than 4-year colleges.
Those upper level english courses require a lot of rigors thinking and are quite challenging,
Art and philosophy require lots of "thinking", too... just not the exacting, logical, process-oriented type needed for engineering.
Yes, because conservative views have turned the tech industry off from flocking to Texas for jobs. There's a sarcasm tag embedded there.
Texas is a purple state, projected to go Blue in a few more years. Texas leans a little bit to the right, but California doesn't lean very heavily left, itself.
Slashdot Mirror
So can people on death row...
And also relevant is the "Death by Fire" arson episode Frontline did, specifically about the evidence in Cameron Todd Willingham's case.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
You've never been near a major fire. It's not the abstract "threat" of possible death that stops you... It's the insane heat, guaranteed 3rd degree burns over your entire body in seconds even several feet away from the flames if you don't have fire fighter's protective gear, that most people can't possibly imagine until they've been up-close and personal with it.
Pour gasoline over your entire body, and light yourself on fire. Then spend two minutes doing any mundane task, without making any move to extinguish the fire and your melting skin the whole time. That's what running into a burning building is like. If you can't successfully overcome the urge to extinguish yourself while engulfed in flames, you wouldn't be able to overcome your body's overwhelming instinct to stops you dead in your tracks from running into a house fire. It's not like the movies.
That's a pretty fucked-up view. While we all hope to be macho and heroic when it really matters, a guy falling just a bit short, sure as hell doesn't deserve to be killed for it.
This entire topic... the problem with forensic "science," was explained extremely well two years ago by Frontline, Episode "The Real CSI". Viewable on their website:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
SPOILER: The upshot is, forensics aren't a science. They were conceived and perpetuated by law enforcement agencies, and have NO theoretical basis, nor standards for the procedures, nor the individuals who are certified as experts. Even something basic like finger prints aren't unique at all, everyone always just assumed they were.
I HATE people who think that execution is inhumane, but locking someone away in a tiny prison cell with a large pool of violent and hardened criminals for decades is perfectly fine... "No harm done!"
If the justice system isn't accurate enough to allow executions, then it's not accurate enough to allow any long-term incarceration or punishment, either.
Sitting "on death row" is no different than going to prison. You seem to be implying 4.1% of the executed are innocent, but that's not what the number means at all!
That 4.1% figure comes from the percentage of those on death row, who are exonerated in the NORMAL appeals process. In other words, they are not executed. It's a reassuringly-low false-conviction rate to begin with, and an example of the system WORKING AS DESIGNED, as they are all released.
Eliminating the death penalty will NOT help this at all.
In fact, it will make matters worse, as the same study determined that "resentenced defendants are eight times less likely to be exonerated than those on death row."
The same study you cited says you're wrong:
"once someone is executed, dies of natural causes, or commits suicide, the chance of being exonerated drops to nearly zero."
In other words, no, it essentially doesn't happen.
Furthermore, last time I checked, not a single condemned person in the US has been exonerated after execution, ever since the death penalty was suspended/reinstated (in 1976). Unless there's been recent news on that front, you can't cite a single one.
I don't agree. Leaving an innocent person to rot in a cell for decades is every bit as inhumane as execution, if not more-so. Removing the threat of the death penalty would allow our judicial system to get far more sloppy, and would remove the last reason for someone with a life sentence not to murder guards or other inmates, with no real consequences.
http://news.sciencemag.org/soc...
I'm not aware of a single one in the US ever since the death penalty was suspended/reinstated (1976). If there has been a new development on that front, please point me to it.
You have a good point. While generally opposed to abortion, I will support its use in any case where the fetus has been convicted of a capital crime, in a court of law.
You REALLY haven't thought this through... there's a million and one things that have to be considered and designed-in to prevent accidents and ensure everything goes right.
You need a big room with lots of air flow, sensors/alarms, just to ensure the safety of the personnel, should something spring a leak, or rupture. You need impressive and strong restraints holding the convict, since they're going to be big powerful men, struggling for their lives before, during, and shortly after.
Your "hospital mask" needs to be something that absolutely, positively can't be removed, disconnected, disabled, rendered partially functional, etc., by the thrashing and struggling convict.
Worst case scenario would be that the condemned gets asphyxiated for several minutes, long enough to cause severe brain damage, but then a convulsion breaks the seal and allows air to leak-in, releasing all the gas with the man's heart and vital organs still working. Lots of effort needs to go into ensuring that can't ever possibly happen, and a half-assed improvised setup isn't ever going to be up to the task.
Considering all the many ways it could go wrong, I wouldn't go with anything less than a gas chamber for performing such a task. Those who have them would need them tested out and repaired after decades of retirement. Those who don't would need to have them built.
Here in the US, we don't believe in guilt by association.
Actually, instead of lagging, I'd say the US is leading the western world. Executions were stopped for several years, and the US is becoming the model for how they can be reintroduced and used in a more modern world. The only question is how long it will take until the EU follows the US' lead...
The "peer pressure" argument falls flat on its face when you look through the past century, and see how much of the world quickly adopted some policy based on a new sociological fad, only to reverse it after people realized that it really didn't have any basis at all.
For example, how many countries began pilot programs for forced sterilization of the poor and infirm (eugenics) in the 1930s? The US was surely lagging behind on that, too.
We're just lucky that eugenics got quickly Godwin'd, and quickly went away. Perhaps lifetime imprisonment will go the same way. After all, it's patently absurd to call execution inhumane, and promoting decade after decade of imprisonment... especially segregated or solitary confinement.
Many of the best commentators from here are also active there, so there's plenty of insightful comments. The overall volume is just low because of recent events.
It got a lot of comments when it was first unveiled, but a bit of drama with the operators that kept making it to the front page, combined with a determination to post more frequent stories than anyone wants, seems to have taken the shine off, and scared plenty of early-adopters away.
Whether it rebounds back to it's path of world domination, or backslides into the abyss, remains to be seen. I remain hopeful.
You don't need to consider population. The number of traffic fatalities has gone down DRAMATICALLY over the past two decades.
"1979 to 2005, the number of deaths per year decreased 14.97% while the number of deaths per capita decreased by 35.46%."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That was true a few years ago, but no longer. They've updated their antiquated parcel rates, and now they're faster and cheaper. Or look at a cheap retailer like Amazon, who uses USPS extensively.
Cheap services from FedEx / UPS (like "Smart Post") are just piggybacking on the USPS, anyhow, and will be delivered by your postal carrier.
Not true anymore. Their "Express Mail" service is usually just as cheap as the old "Parcel Post" option, with fast delivery (usually 1-3 days).
Source?
I've never had a problem with USPS staff. And Fedex and UPS offices are usually MIA... You're lucky if there's one within an hour's drive from you. And don't be surprised if they're closed half the day, or if the nearest one doesn't handle home deliveries, so you need to drive to an even-more distant one to pick up a package.
Meanwhile, there's a post office in every city, if not more than one, open for full business hours and Saturdays, and staffed by multiple people all the time.
UPS charges extra for Saturday delivery, and will charge you if you want to pick up your package at a UPS Store instead of taking a day off work, or driving 5 cities over to the office, in the hour after you get off of work, but before they close...
Fedex is slightly better, with Tues-Sat deliveries standard. But the USPS has always done that, and they're even doing *Sunday* deliveries for Amazon.
And it's located on a public right-of-way, next to the road, NOT on your property (usually).
Except human trials have found women feel more relaxed around sweaty, smelly men who don't wear deodorant (or just their dirty shirts). Pheremones are important.
I imagine female mice don't have the same reaction to male pheremones.
I'm sure... The crazies always seem to attract more crazies:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...
As long as the Earth doesn't turn into Pluto, we've got astronomical amounts out easily accessible solar power.
The major elements that make up our modern world are ridiculously abundant. Silicon, iron and aluminum are #2, #3 and #4. We aren't ever going to run out of them, and we need little more than those to restart the industrial revolution from scratch.
It's purely wishful thinking that there are many others out there. The Drake equation has many variables which we can't begin to ball-park...
Just how likely is life to arise? How likely is it to evolve into complex organisms? How likely is it that it develops into sentient beings?
With our single sample, and far too little knowledge about how it happened, nobody can even making a GUESS about what numbers to fill-in for the above... it's just a completely baseless wild assumption. Dogma and wishful thinking only minimally disguised as science.
People's desires for there to be a deus ex out there, which will swoop in at any moment, and solve all our hard problems for us, seems to overwhelm all logic and rigor.
You fell asleep watching Fortress 2 on TV, again, didn't you?
I, for one, welcome our unionized android tradesman overlords.
How do I get a job as a "software"?
71k sounds like good money for becoming an incorporeal abstract concept.
Let's just call that: "Plan B"
You don't need the DDNS update client running on your router... See instructions here: http://www.dnsdynamic.org/api....
OpenWRT has packages for damn near every Linux program, which you can run on your router... You can even install devel packages and compile it yourself.
http://www.dnsdynamic.org/ pledges to be free, forever. Plus I like their tftpd.net domain. Asus's DDNS is a commercial product, and certainly has no such pledge, so they're pretty damn sure to go the way of dyndns.
An ax is terrible at splitting wood. A maul / wedge is a very specific tool, that isn't good at any other job a normal ax can do.
Saying this weird ax does better at wood splitting than a normal chopping ax, without comparing it to a wedge/maul, is stupid and pointless.
And what were YOU planning on using to protect yourself during the zombie apocalypse? Ammo is gonna get scarce, and swords are more expensive and less damaging.
Swinging a sledge hammer is laborious.
Community colleges have astronomically high failure rates. That doesn't mean their courses are harder than 4-year colleges.
Art and philosophy require lots of "thinking", too... just not the exacting, logical, process-oriented type needed for engineering.
Texas is a purple state, projected to go Blue in a few more years. Texas leans a little bit to the right, but California doesn't lean very heavily left, itself.