You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but please be aware that, if you consider stem-cell embyros to be "viable humans", orders of magnitude more "viable humans" are destroyed by discarding excess IVF embryos and by abortion than have ever been used to produce stem cells.
Yes, that's true, but there is such a thing as dying with dignity. If an embryo is not going to be used, I'd rather see them destroyed in a dignified way than just say, "well, they ain't goin' anywhere, let's do some experiments! Yeee HAW!"
And I'm against abortion as well for these same reasons. And there's no arguing that those embryos aren't viable.
Sure, in the luxury of the Nile and protected by the desert, Egyptians didn't have much motivation to behave as exploitative, expansive Romans, but they sure as hell knew how to apply simple mathematics to engineering projects a good couple of millennia before Rome.
Of course people threw together some structures before Rome, but so what? The point is that Rome didn't just sit on all these advances, they brought them to the savages in the outlying areas. They spread civilization around the world, similar to what England did during their Empire years. You're talking about a few insulated societies who managed to naval-gaze for awhile, I'm talking about civilizing the world.
Please state what you're actually trying to say - is it Christian philosophy that causes empires to fall?
Where do you think the power went to once the Roman empire fell? Straight to the Roman Catholic church is where. They grabbed the power for themselves and undermined the Empire. The Church enslaved far more people than the Romans ever dreamed up -- they just did it in a more subtle way. "Put your faith in God, and honor him by building this church! And by giving us a tithe! And by the way, you better put your faith in God or we'll slaughter you." It's just slavery by a different method.
Again, Rome was fascist.
Of course they were! But they were on the path toward modern society. Technology would have brought about the evolution of that society away from a slave-based empire to a capitalistic one, just like the English kings eventually gave power to its business citizens -- because it made more money that way. It was still brutal, but it was moving in the direction of greater freedom.
Instead, the anti-science Church plunged everybody back into darkness and superstition that lasted over a thousand years, and even then Galileo was put in jail for being a scientist. If Galileo had the same ideas in the Roman empire, he would not have been persecuted.
It's undeniable that the fall of Rome was a travesty of history.
I can't find a screenshot of the browser, except for this page, which looks like ass. The fact that they don't show a real web page in their advertisement makes me think that the pages don't look exactly like a desktop browser.
Never going to happen, not even with an iPhone, unless you're prepared to carry around a 12" monitor with you. [...] But I'm not going to do any serious browsing on anything with a screen size of the Treo or iPhone.
That's what I'm telling you. It *has* happened. I don't know if you've played with the iPhone for any length of time, but it has a virtual 1024 pixel-wide screen that scales the image to the phone screen. You see the whole page, then can zoom into the area that you want. Very rarely do you read an entire web page at once -- usually you focus in on one area to read. When you double tap on an area, the iPhone zooms the table dimensions to the phone. It's incredible well done.
Seriously -- I hate Apple. I'm not an Apple fanboy, just using his new toy rather than a laptop because I can. I use the iPhone for surfing ALL of my regular web sites and don't miss the laptop at all*. It's small, light and intuitive, and I can sit in any position while browsing. It works way, way better than you would think.
*Well, one caveat: you can't cut/paste on the iPhone, so it makes posting on Slashdot kind of a pain.:)
But what really makes the iPhone different is that for the first time it feels like a real computer that happens to have a phone, rather than the other way around. It's pretty damn cool to load on the BSD tools, bring up a shell and have a full Unix computer at my command.
Remember, religious people haven't had issues with adult stem cell research
It's always been false to blame "religious nuts" as being the only ones against harvesting embryonic stem cells. I'm an atheist, and I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of medical experiments on viable humans.
That's why I have a Treo, and have had it for years. It can do all the things you mentioned--web browsing [...]
Which phone and browser do you have? I shopped for a phone recently, and my #1 requirement was that it have a browser that was absolutely, perfectly equivalent to a desktop browser. All the phones I looked at had these brain damaged, stripped down, site-mangling piles of browser crap.
Say what you want about the iPhone, but the browser works exactly like a desktop. And don't underestimate how well multitouch works when zooming and panning different parts of a web site. I used to use a wireless laptop on my couch for nighttime browsing, and my iPhone has actually replaced it. It's nice and light, and surprisingly effective at browsing any web site. I do wish it had Flash, though.
Thank you for using the acronym for "imaginary property" rather than pretending that anything that's only in your head bears any resemblance to actual, real, concrete property.
The whole concept of property is imaginary. What's your point? The only reason the idea of property exists at all is because society set up a system of rules to decide what belongs to whom. By the same token, society can decide exactly what can be owned as well.
More like, "IM is for kids with unlimited time", rather than email is for old people. For awhile, I used IM a lot, then I figured out what an incredible time sink it was. I changed my account and gave it only to a few select people, and even then it's only used when someone wants to ask me a quick question or give me a "come here a second".
I suspect that rather than be some generational thing that only the new generation "gets it", it'll be abandoned by that same generation once they grow up and get real lives.
'He is an amazing reverse-engineer,' recounts team leader Tim McNerney, 'We understood the disassembled calculator code well enough to simulate it, but Lajos really turned it into "source code" of the highest standards.' [...] Sure looks to me that what Lajos is being credited with isn't the disassembly, at all.
I disagree, McNerney seems to be saying that they understood the machine language well enough to simulate the calculator, but Lajos disassembled and commented the source code so that they understood what it was doing. It's the difference between the MAME guys who write a processor simulator and the guys who actually disassembly the ROMs to see how they work.
Either task for this calculator is pretty damn simple. It's just that somehow modern programmers have been taught to fear assembly and machine language as something too arcane to be understood by mortals. I actually blame the universities who typically teach assembly language as an afterthought, rather than teach it in the first year as it ought to be.
'He is an amazing reverse-engineer,' recounts team leader Tim McNerney, 'We understood the disassembled calculator code well enough to simulate it, but Lajos really turned it into "source code" of the highest standards.'
No disrespect to Lajos, but have we really fallen so far in programming standards that it's considered "amazing" to disassemble a 1024 byte program? Back in my day (and stay the hell off my lawn!) we used to disassemble programs all the time. I reverse engineered the operating system for a computer I developed for because we wanted to hook into places that weren't accessible.
Disassembly is apparently a lost art in these decadent days of some programmers never using anything but scripting languages (e.g., Java, Python, Perl) and having no clue what goes on under the hood.
Once you have cheap, easy engineering of microbial life, you also have thousands of people competent to work on cures, genetic enhancements, immune system upgrades, rapid turn-around vaccines, and so forth.
That's assuming people know the doomsday virus even exists. By the time everyone starts dying, it's too late. Civilization would fall if that many people died at once -- including power plants. It's always easier to destroy than to create. Just because we have the atomic bomb doesn't mean we have "rapid turn around defenses" to it.
Or will you be testing it in a petri dish and presuming you can mod it defect-free to both work in humans and incubate for 10 years.
You would create an animal version and test the timer mechanism for a shorter time.
setting aside the hilarity of how difficult such an incubation effect would be.
Difficult? This is engineering we're talking about. The body already has a lot of timer mechanisms, such as the ones that limit the number of cell divisions. What, you don't think biology is rather flexible?
Not even influenza or ebola kills 99 percent of people, incidentally, but don't let that stop your alarmist hyperbole.
Sheesh, now you're just being silly. There are many poisons that kill people with 100% reliability. You know why diseases don't tend to? Because they burn themselves out too quickly and can't spread quickly enough. But, once again, we're talking about an intelligently designed disease specifically engineered to hide, and then kill.
Are you seriously arguing that it's impossible to design a bioweapon with a delayed fuse? Yeah, and mankind will never fly because flapping wings are too complex.
I don't think about it a whole lot, but back in my mind, I've thought that this is what will kill off all humans on the planet before the end of my natural life. Once you have cheap, easy engineering of microbial life, then all it takes is exactly ONE maniac to design a transmittable disease that will wipe out everyone.
Don't think anyone would do that? Look at some of the more rabid environmentalists who think the worst thing that ever happened to Earth was humanity. Theodore Kaczinsky was a genius, and with only a slight modification of his psychosis, he would've been a guy who would've thought about wiping everyone out.
Designing a disease like this would be almost pathetically simple with the right tools. Design it to be extremely infectious, but with an incubation period of 10 years before it starts killing. By the time people start dropping dead, it will be everywhere. 99% of everyone would be dead within months.
I honestly don't see how it could NOT happen -- eventually. Yet another reason why we need to get people into space habitats.
If any technology should be tightly controlled, this is it.
If you make one yourself with good ingredients (low fat milk and icecream, artificial sweetener, fresh fruit), it'll be about 250 for the same size.
Hmm. Artificially filtered milk, artificially filtered and sweetened ice cream, artificial sweetener -- and fresh fruit. Yep, them's good ingredients! Just like Grandma used to make!
But they're not doing it for altruism, "free-as-in" freedom or geek points. They are doing it for money. Spend yours elsewhere and make the world a better place.
Er, exactly which store *is* selling them for alturism, "free-as-in freedom" or geek points, and is *not* doing it for money?
If you RTFA, Microsoft attempted to do a deal with a *private company* who was supplying the computers. No "bribery" here, just two companies making an agreement. Sure, Microsoft's motivation is to move more software over a competitor, but why is that a problem? If Microsoft wants to discount its software or given the company some other benefit, then whatever.
Why is this even a story? Oh, because it's Microsoft trying to outcompete a Linux supplier, therefore, it's intrinsically evil.
The only news here is that the Nigerian government decided to tell the supplier that they preferred the Linux distribution. Interesting, but hardly a conspiracy.
Earth is not so valuable and we have already over-polluted it, it's like stealing your neighbours garbage can.
Sheesh, bitter much? Get out of your polluted city and go out in the country some time. A tiny proportion of the Earth has any significant pollution.
Even if I did grant your point, all the aliens would have to do is eliminate humanity and most of the Earth would be back to wilderness within a few decades/centuries, and entirely wilderness within a few thousand.
Well, as Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] notes, western films (such as The Terminator, The Matrix, and I, Robot) quite often involve killer robots.
What object in society *hasn't* been turned into a killer? Just because we have the movie Cujo doesn't mean society fears dogs. If something exists, it'll be turned into a plot device. Hell, Stephen King wrote a horror story about a possessed laundry machine ("The Mangler").
I can think of a bunch of examples of friendly robots: Bicentennial Man movie, Hymie from Get Smart, Kitt from Night Rider (though, he's not humanoid), that little robot in the Buck Rogers TV series, Data from Star Trek, etc.
I'd like to disagree with you on a minor point. It is not that we have no desire, it is that we have neither the required technology to inspire the desire nor the perceived value in a bang-for-buck kind of way.
I think that's more-or-less what I said, unless I'm misunderstanding your point.
Show me some evidence that Americans have an aversion to robots. You can't, because it doesn't exist. What it really proves is that Americans don't have a particular cultural desire for "robot buddies" as the Japanese seem to.
But the bigger issue is that we don't have any real robot technology that can do anything useful. And we won't have that until we have a real science of Artificial Intelligence, which doesn't exist right now.
Create a consumer a humanoid robot maid that can do all household chores, and Americans would buy millions of them without a qualm. Of course, the next step would be sex robots disguised as maid robots because of the social stigma of sexbots. When we have *that*, we'll have robots everywhere.
Let me guess... they're going to offer it for free/at a reduced price in exchange for giving up all your privacy.
Privacy is just another asset I can use to barter. Why is it intrinsically "evil" for someone to choose to sell it? And yes, I understand that not everyone understands exactly what they're selling, but that's a consumer problem.
And how does that give your son his life back? What does that bring you, except the sweet feeling of revenge?
It doesn't bring my son back. But it does protect society from the person murdering again while they're in jail, it provides some amount of deterrence to others who might do it, and forces the person to pay their debt to society, and hopefully not want to repeat it.
So what do you think the punishment for crime should be, if not to put people in jail? Apparently you think we put people in jail only for the revenge factor.
A woman claims her innocence to the point where she breaks out of jail.
What, only innocent people try and break out of jail? Please.
Given that she spent 35 years on the outside with no further crimes, I'd say that she's pretty rehabilitated already.... but I guess not.
So what's your point? If we convict people who MURDER their spouses, we should let them out to see if they can turn their life around? If your sister's husband murders your sister, then escapes, are you OK with just letting him go? If you're OK with murder, I assume you're OK if he just beats her up.
Of course, we have to be consistent. If any prison claims that their innocent, we should let them out. Or if any prison *might* live a productive life, we should let them out. Or if any prison can manage to escape AND stay hidden for along enough time without any crime, then their crime will be forgiven.
Maybe you can define exactly what you want the rule to be.
If it was my son that was murdered by this woman, I'd be pretty happy that we have better tools to catch bad people. This was a huge win for law enforcement. I'm glad we're finding these people and not letting them chortle day after day about how they "got away with it."
The rest of us would vote for him because it's funny.
I know it's fashionable to be cynical about elections, but personally I'd rather not have presidential elections turned into a stage for a comedian, just for the sake of his own publicity. I think he should spend his own money for publicity, not waste my tax dollars.
I'm sure a lot of people at least would vote for him had he had the chance.
But then, a lot of people vote for Mickey Mouse as a protest vote. Call me crazy, but I actually find this bid for attention by him kind of offensive. Fine, he can make jokes about the elections, but don't waste everyone's time and money by making fools out of election people.
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You're practically the only one. Almost everyone else opposed to embryonic stem cell research has a religious affiliation.
I think that's more a function of religious people having an organized voice that makes it into the media.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but please be aware that, if you consider stem-cell embyros to be "viable humans", orders of magnitude more "viable humans" are destroyed by discarding excess IVF embryos and by abortion than have ever been used to produce stem cells.
Yes, that's true, but there is such a thing as dying with dignity. If an embryo is not going to be used, I'd rather see them destroyed in a dignified way than just say, "well, they ain't goin' anywhere, let's do some experiments! Yeee HAW!"
And I'm against abortion as well for these same reasons. And there's no arguing that those embryos aren't viable.
Sure, in the luxury of the Nile and protected by the desert, Egyptians didn't have much motivation to behave as exploitative, expansive Romans, but they sure as hell knew how to apply simple mathematics to engineering projects a good couple of millennia before Rome.
Of course people threw together some structures before Rome, but so what? The point is that Rome didn't just sit on all these advances, they brought them to the savages in the outlying areas. They spread civilization around the world, similar to what England did during their Empire years. You're talking about a few insulated societies who managed to naval-gaze for awhile, I'm talking about civilizing the world.
Please state what you're actually trying to say - is it Christian philosophy that causes empires to fall?
Where do you think the power went to once the Roman empire fell? Straight to the Roman Catholic church is where. They grabbed the power for themselves and undermined the Empire. The Church enslaved far more people than the Romans ever dreamed up -- they just did it in a more subtle way. "Put your faith in God, and honor him by building this church! And by giving us a tithe! And by the way, you better put your faith in God or we'll slaughter you." It's just slavery by a different method.
Again, Rome was fascist.
Of course they were! But they were on the path toward modern society. Technology would have brought about the evolution of that society away from a slave-based empire to a capitalistic one, just like the English kings eventually gave power to its business citizens -- because it made more money that way. It was still brutal, but it was moving in the direction of greater freedom.
Instead, the anti-science Church plunged everybody back into darkness and superstition that lasted over a thousand years, and even then Galileo was put in jail for being a scientist. If Galileo had the same ideas in the Roman empire, he would not have been persecuted.
It's undeniable that the fall of Rome was a travesty of history.
Treo 650 with the standard Blazer browser.
I can't find a screenshot of the browser, except for this page, which looks like ass. The fact that they don't show a real web page in their advertisement makes me think that the pages don't look exactly like a desktop browser.
Never going to happen, not even with an iPhone, unless you're prepared to carry around a 12" monitor with you. [...] But I'm not going to do any serious browsing on anything with a screen size of the Treo or iPhone.
That's what I'm telling you. It *has* happened. I don't know if you've played with the iPhone for any length of time, but it has a virtual 1024 pixel-wide screen that scales the image to the phone screen. You see the whole page, then can zoom into the area that you want. Very rarely do you read an entire web page at once -- usually you focus in on one area to read. When you double tap on an area, the iPhone zooms the table dimensions to the phone. It's incredible well done.
Seriously -- I hate Apple. I'm not an Apple fanboy, just using his new toy rather than a laptop because I can. I use the iPhone for surfing ALL of my regular web sites and don't miss the laptop at all*. It's small, light and intuitive, and I can sit in any position while browsing. It works way, way better than you would think.
*Well, one caveat: you can't cut/paste on the iPhone, so it makes posting on Slashdot kind of a pain. :)
But what really makes the iPhone different is that for the first time it feels like a real computer that happens to have a phone, rather than the other way around. It's pretty damn cool to load on the BSD tools, bring up a shell and have a full Unix computer at my command.
Remember, religious people haven't had issues with adult stem cell research
It's always been false to blame "religious nuts" as being the only ones against harvesting embryonic stem cells. I'm an atheist, and I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of medical experiments on viable humans.
That's why I have a Treo, and have had it for years. It can do all the things you mentioned--web browsing [...]
Which phone and browser do you have? I shopped for a phone recently, and my #1 requirement was that it have a browser that was absolutely, perfectly equivalent to a desktop browser. All the phones I looked at had these brain damaged, stripped down, site-mangling piles of browser crap.
Say what you want about the iPhone, but the browser works exactly like a desktop. And don't underestimate how well multitouch works when zooming and panning different parts of a web site. I used to use a wireless laptop on my couch for nighttime browsing, and my iPhone has actually replaced it. It's nice and light, and surprisingly effective at browsing any web site. I do wish it had Flash, though.
Thank you for using the acronym for "imaginary property" rather than pretending that anything that's only in your head bears any resemblance to actual, real, concrete property.
The whole concept of property is imaginary. What's your point? The only reason the idea of property exists at all is because society set up a system of rules to decide what belongs to whom. By the same token, society can decide exactly what can be owned as well.
More like, "IM is for kids with unlimited time", rather than email is for old people. For awhile, I used IM a lot, then I figured out what an incredible time sink it was. I changed my account and gave it only to a few select people, and even then it's only used when someone wants to ask me a quick question or give me a "come here a second".
I suspect that rather than be some generational thing that only the new generation "gets it", it'll be abandoned by that same generation once they grow up and get real lives.
'He is an amazing reverse-engineer,' recounts team leader Tim McNerney, 'We understood the disassembled calculator code well enough to simulate it, but Lajos really turned it into "source code" of the highest standards.' [...] Sure looks to me that what Lajos is being credited with isn't the disassembly, at all.
I disagree, McNerney seems to be saying that they understood the machine language well enough to simulate the calculator, but Lajos disassembled and commented the source code so that they understood what it was doing. It's the difference between the MAME guys who write a processor simulator and the guys who actually disassembly the ROMs to see how they work.
Either task for this calculator is pretty damn simple. It's just that somehow modern programmers have been taught to fear assembly and machine language as something too arcane to be understood by mortals. I actually blame the universities who typically teach assembly language as an afterthought, rather than teach it in the first year as it ought to be.
'He is an amazing reverse-engineer,' recounts team leader Tim McNerney, 'We understood the disassembled calculator code well enough to simulate it, but Lajos really turned it into "source code" of the highest standards.'
No disrespect to Lajos, but have we really fallen so far in programming standards that it's considered "amazing" to disassemble a 1024 byte program? Back in my day (and stay the hell off my lawn!) we used to disassemble programs all the time. I reverse engineered the operating system for a computer I developed for because we wanted to hook into places that weren't accessible.
Disassembly is apparently a lost art in these decadent days of some programmers never using anything but scripting languages (e.g., Java, Python, Perl) and having no clue what goes on under the hood.
Once you have cheap, easy engineering of microbial life, you also have thousands of people competent to work on cures, genetic enhancements, immune system upgrades, rapid turn-around vaccines, and so forth.
That's assuming people know the doomsday virus even exists. By the time everyone starts dying, it's too late. Civilization would fall if that many people died at once -- including power plants. It's always easier to destroy than to create. Just because we have the atomic bomb doesn't mean we have "rapid turn around defenses" to it.
Or will you be testing it in a petri dish and presuming you can mod it defect-free to both work in humans and incubate for 10 years.
You would create an animal version and test the timer mechanism for a shorter time.
setting aside the hilarity of how difficult such an incubation effect would be.
Difficult? This is engineering we're talking about. The body already has a lot of timer mechanisms, such as the ones that limit the number of cell divisions. What, you don't think biology is rather flexible?
Not even influenza or ebola kills 99 percent of people, incidentally, but don't let that stop your alarmist hyperbole.
Sheesh, now you're just being silly. There are many poisons that kill people with 100% reliability. You know why diseases don't tend to? Because they burn themselves out too quickly and can't spread quickly enough. But, once again, we're talking about an intelligently designed disease specifically engineered to hide, and then kill.
Are you seriously arguing that it's impossible to design a bioweapon with a delayed fuse? Yeah, and mankind will never fly because flapping wings are too complex.
I don't think about it a whole lot, but back in my mind, I've thought that this is what will kill off all humans on the planet before the end of my natural life. Once you have cheap, easy engineering of microbial life, then all it takes is exactly ONE maniac to design a transmittable disease that will wipe out everyone.
Don't think anyone would do that? Look at some of the more rabid environmentalists who think the worst thing that ever happened to Earth was humanity. Theodore Kaczinsky was a genius, and with only a slight modification of his psychosis, he would've been a guy who would've thought about wiping everyone out.
Designing a disease like this would be almost pathetically simple with the right tools. Design it to be extremely infectious, but with an incubation period of 10 years before it starts killing. By the time people start dropping dead, it will be everywhere. 99% of everyone would be dead within months.
I honestly don't see how it could NOT happen -- eventually. Yet another reason why we need to get people into space habitats.
If any technology should be tightly controlled, this is it.
If you make one yourself with good ingredients (low fat milk and icecream, artificial sweetener, fresh fruit), it'll be about 250 for the same size.
Hmm. Artificially filtered milk, artificially filtered and sweetened ice cream, artificial sweetener -- and fresh fruit. Yep, them's good ingredients! Just like Grandma used to make!
But they're not doing it for altruism, "free-as-in" freedom or geek points. They are doing it for money. Spend yours elsewhere and make the world a better place.
Er, exactly which store *is* selling them for alturism, "free-as-in freedom" or geek points, and is *not* doing it for money?
If you RTFA, Microsoft attempted to do a deal with a *private company* who was supplying the computers. No "bribery" here, just two companies making an agreement. Sure, Microsoft's motivation is to move more software over a competitor, but why is that a problem? If Microsoft wants to discount its software or given the company some other benefit, then whatever.
Why is this even a story? Oh, because it's Microsoft trying to outcompete a Linux supplier, therefore, it's intrinsically evil.
The only news here is that the Nigerian government decided to tell the supplier that they preferred the Linux distribution. Interesting, but hardly a conspiracy.
Earth is not so valuable and we have already over-polluted it, it's like stealing your neighbours garbage can.
Sheesh, bitter much? Get out of your polluted city and go out in the country some time. A tiny proportion of the Earth has any significant pollution.
Even if I did grant your point, all the aliens would have to do is eliminate humanity and most of the Earth would be back to wilderness within a few decades/centuries, and entirely wilderness within a few thousand.
Well, as Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] notes, western films (such as The Terminator, The Matrix, and I, Robot) quite often involve killer robots.
What object in society *hasn't* been turned into a killer? Just because we have the movie Cujo doesn't mean society fears dogs. If something exists, it'll be turned into a plot device. Hell, Stephen King wrote a horror story about a possessed laundry machine ("The Mangler").
I can think of a bunch of examples of friendly robots: Bicentennial Man movie, Hymie from Get Smart, Kitt from Night Rider (though, he's not humanoid), that little robot in the Buck Rogers TV series, Data from Star Trek, etc.
I'd like to disagree with you on a minor point. It is not that we have no desire, it is that we have neither the required technology to inspire the desire nor the perceived value in a bang-for-buck kind of way.
I think that's more-or-less what I said, unless I'm misunderstanding your point.
Show me some evidence that Americans have an aversion to robots. You can't, because it doesn't exist. What it really proves is that Americans don't have a particular cultural desire for "robot buddies" as the Japanese seem to.
But the bigger issue is that we don't have any real robot technology that can do anything useful. And we won't have that until we have a real science of Artificial Intelligence, which doesn't exist right now.
Create a consumer a humanoid robot maid that can do all household chores, and Americans would buy millions of them without a qualm. Of course, the next step would be sex robots disguised as maid robots because of the social stigma of sexbots. When we have *that*, we'll have robots everywhere.
Let me guess... they're going to offer it for free/at a reduced price in exchange for giving up all your privacy.
Privacy is just another asset I can use to barter. Why is it intrinsically "evil" for someone to choose to sell it? And yes, I understand that not everyone understands exactly what they're selling, but that's a consumer problem.
And how does that give your son his life back? What does that bring you, except the sweet feeling of revenge?
It doesn't bring my son back. But it does protect society from the person murdering again while they're in jail, it provides some amount of deterrence to others who might do it, and forces the person to pay their debt to society, and hopefully not want to repeat it.
So what do you think the punishment for crime should be, if not to put people in jail? Apparently you think we put people in jail only for the revenge factor.
A woman claims her innocence to the point where she breaks out of jail.
What, only innocent people try and break out of jail? Please.
Given that she spent 35 years on the outside with no further crimes, I'd say that she's pretty rehabilitated already.... but I guess not.
So what's your point? If we convict people who MURDER their spouses, we should let them out to see if they can turn their life around? If your sister's husband murders your sister, then escapes, are you OK with just letting him go? If you're OK with murder, I assume you're OK if he just beats her up.
Of course, we have to be consistent. If any prison claims that their innocent, we should let them out. Or if any prison *might* live a productive life, we should let them out. Or if any prison can manage to escape AND stay hidden for along enough time without any crime, then their crime will be forgiven.
Maybe you can define exactly what you want the rule to be.
If it was my son that was murdered by this woman, I'd be pretty happy that we have better tools to catch bad people. This was a huge win for law enforcement. I'm glad we're finding these people and not letting them chortle day after day about how they "got away with it."
The rest of us would vote for him because it's funny.
I know it's fashionable to be cynical about elections, but personally I'd rather not have presidential elections turned into a stage for a comedian, just for the sake of his own publicity. I think he should spend his own money for publicity, not waste my tax dollars.
The next time some knothead tells me that anybody can run, I'll point him to this story.
Except that he wasn't running. He was using the election process as the straight man for his comedy routine.
And he's welcome to run as an independent, if he can get enough support.
I'm sure a lot of people at least would vote for him had he had the chance.
But then, a lot of people vote for Mickey Mouse as a protest vote. Call me crazy, but I actually find this bid for attention by him kind of offensive. Fine, he can make jokes about the elections, but don't waste everyone's time and money by making fools out of election people.