In modern America? Take a picture of the polling machine, and I'd half expect a police officer to jump out from behind the curtain and arrest you for planning a terrorist attack.
ATM machines have eight. A common phone keypad has twelve. Hex pads have sixteen. If you allow the use of numerical identifiers, eleven buttons is enough to specify one from any number of candidates.
Yes, he would have. He outright stated as much, repeatidly saying that a painless death would be 'inhumane' to the victims as it would deny the severity of the crime.
State marriage is just a recognition of marriages - the idea goes back much, much further. Thousands of years. Look at how it really originated to get really cynical.
All our notions of romance, 'the one,' and so on? Modern. Strip them off. Marriage, as it began, was about ownership. Women were owned, men were the owners, and there needed to be some way to establish who a woman belonged to.
You can see this, because we still have a convenient 'handbook for running your tribe' book. The set of codified rules by which a society of the time ran. We call it the old testament today, but let us take a look at a few extracts:
"You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's." - Exodus 20:17. Here we see a list of property, and there the women is. Alongside house and donkey.
Yet there is another, more blatant still:
"“If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her." - Deuteronomy 22:28–29. In modern language: 'You broke it, you bought it.' We would consider it utterly evil to proscribe that a raped woman must marry her rapist, but in the society of the time remember that women were property: Rape wasn't a crime against the woman, but a crime against her owner.
Enough of the religion-bashing. The point made is that marriage is old. Really old. It's actually prehistoric - going back past all written record. The state didn't establish marriages to promote reproduction - it established marriages because you can't enforce a property law if the state doesn't recognise it. All the modern romantic notions came later.
Actually, they *do* get an exception. The big outrage isn't about churches. It's about businesses which are owned by Christians or closely affiliated with churches - Hobby Lobby leads the legal action. The exception is limited to 'official' churches only. Hobby Lobby's owners argue that as they are Christians in a church which forbids contraception, their first-amendment protection of their religious beliefs extends to the company they own, and as such the mandated contraception coverage is unconstitutional.
The problem I have with that idea is just that it makes a mockery of the law. There's no point in having a law if anyone can just declare 'I'm religious, I'm exempt!' What's to stop someone from declaring that their religion forbids paying taxes, or a manufacturing company claiming to be exempt from environmental protection laws because it's owners believe the end of the world is due in a matter of years?
The reason they have no dignity is that biology SUCKS. We didn't evolve to live forever. Clams did, jellyfish did, humans didn't. There comes a time when it all falls apart: Your skin sags, your joints seize up, your hearing fails, your eyes fog, your hair falls out. Then your mind starts to go. You spend your final days a trembling wreck in a care home, eating the soft foods your toothless jaw can still handle and interrupting the nurse every five minutes to tell her you need to go home to feed that cat that died twenty years ago. There is no dignity there. Medical technology can slow this process down, and has achieved wonderful things in that field - what was once knocking on death's door is now only middle age, with many fifty-year-olds still in excellent health - but slowing is all it can do. Unless there is a revolution in medicine, it can only delay those inevitable years of senility.
With two problems: 1. Patients can't put it in themselves. Self-injection needs training even for healthy people, and these are not healthy. Stroke victims, arthritic ninety-year-olds, people who couldn't hold a pen. 2. You can't require someone else do it. Many doctors would refuse, considering it a violation of their oath and ethical code. Even if the individual doctor would, hospital policy or professional associations may forbid it.
The closest thing to a solution for that I've found is a morphine pump. The doctor hooks it up, but the patient then has to perform the final act of pressing the button to start it.
But it is vengeance. It is human nature to seek revenge - a simple instinct that evolved long before agriculture, to enforce the social rules of a tribe. People today might call it 'justice' to try to sound more enlightened, but as Wombat demonstrates, it's the same old drive. You can't defeat it without first acknowledging it.
There was a BBC program on this subject. They investigated many historical methods of execution, deciding on which was the 'ideal' method. Criteria were chosen: It had to be reliable, easily administered by persons of little training, not require difficult-to-source materials, clean and painless. The eventual winner was aspixiation with nitrogen, which met all of these criteria. This idea was then presented to the leader of a pro-death-penalty pressure group in the US.
He rejected it immediately, on the grounds that it was inhumane... to the victims. How is it justice, he asked, for a murderer to die peacefully if his victim did not?
There we have the problem of execution. The death penalty has many purposes. It is a deterrent. It is a way to dispose of those too dangerous to ever free. But it is also a way to satisfy people's base desire for revenge, to see the guilty made to suffer slowly and painfully. Nitrogen could have been introduced a century ago with ease - but it isn't politically viable: It's just *too* painless to satisfy that desire to inflict punishment. If the death doesn't hurt, people feel that the scales of karma remain unbalanced.
I imagine that a plastic bag, a hose and some sellotape will do as well as a mask. Nitrogen from a welding supply store, or helium from party supply. But remember these are terminally ill people - some of them will be bed-bound, and many unable to travel without assistance.
Easy enough for a healthy person - helium would work. Just don't get the cheap balloon gas, they dilute it with air. This isn't about healthy people, though - these are terminally ill, many stuck in hospital, some unable to even get out of bed without assistance.
Like most political positions, 'strict constitutionalist' should always be followed by 'so long as this does not conflict with my higher-priority goals.' See, for example, all the people who will in one paragraph decry the way the federal government has taken over healthcare, and in the very next paragraph say that the federal government needs to act to ban gay marriage.
As this one was caught via user-specific codes (Something practical only in online distribution, no good on pressed discs), none of that would have helped.
Population control runs into political difficulties. Firstly because contraception is considered evil by many religious organisations, and secondly because many political groups consider the right to a family to be utterly inalienable and any government attempt to intrude on that, even non-coercively, abhorent. Thus population control can only work when it is either done under-the-radar and indirectly, or by a government which has little need to care how popular the program is (China).
You're right. Pedophile enabler is stupid. And yet, it works. Do not underestimate public ignorance and desire for a good old-fashioned moral outrage, or a legitimate target to hate. Pedophiles are the new communists, or witches. A little flimsy evidence is all you need to ruin someone's life. After all, if they won't reveal the key, they must be guilty.
The US *does* shut down porn sites. Technically, all internet pornography is illegal in the US. It's just a law that no-one bothers to enforce any more. Occasionally a DA or AG will try to prove his family credentials by taking on a porn site, but it's just embarassing even when they win.
In theory, yes - though it'd take some time to be implimented. It'd be a big step though, as it would undermine all trust in the DNS system, and that is something the US can't afford to do right now. The UN is already pressing for a more multinational management - an abuse of power by the US would only prove them right.
There's a procedure to follow, though. Anti-crypto laws are tricky things to get through politically. Doable, but it needs a good excuse, and 'Hollywood isn't rich enough' is not going to do it easily. The obvious justification is child porn. The mere suspicion of child pornography is toxic today, and any acts justified as opposing child porn are near-impossible to argue against without being branded a pedophile-enabler.
The economic viability determines if people have a reason to care. What's the point campaigning against the government (or corporations, or your neighbour) doing something they can't afford to do it anyway?
Programming for the GPU is also trickier - it's a specialised task, and so hiring a programmer experienced in the field is going to be a bit trickier and more expensive than hiring a programmer who can work with general-purpose processors.
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In modern America? Take a picture of the polling machine, and I'd half expect a police officer to jump out from behind the curtain and arrest you for planning a terrorist attack.
ATM machines have eight. A common phone keypad has twelve. Hex pads have sixteen. If you allow the use of numerical identifiers, eleven buttons is enough to specify one from any number of candidates.
Yes, he would have. He outright stated as much, repeatidly saying that a painless death would be 'inhumane' to the victims as it would deny the severity of the crime.
'Civilised' is a very subjective term.
State marriage is just a recognition of marriages - the idea goes back much, much further. Thousands of years. Look at how it really originated to get really cynical.
All our notions of romance, 'the one,' and so on? Modern. Strip them off. Marriage, as it began, was about ownership. Women were owned, men were the owners, and there needed to be some way to establish who a woman belonged to.
You can see this, because we still have a convenient 'handbook for running your tribe' book. The set of codified rules by which a society of the time ran. We call it the old testament today, but let us take a look at a few extracts:
"You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's." - Exodus 20:17. Here we see a list of property, and there the women is. Alongside house and donkey.
Yet there is another, more blatant still:
"“If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her." - Deuteronomy 22:28–29. In modern language: 'You broke it, you bought it.' We would consider it utterly evil to proscribe that a raped woman must marry her rapist, but in the society of the time remember that women were property: Rape wasn't a crime against the woman, but a crime against her owner.
Enough of the religion-bashing. The point made is that marriage is old. Really old. It's actually prehistoric - going back past all written record. The state didn't establish marriages to promote reproduction - it established marriages because you can't enforce a property law if the state doesn't recognise it. All the modern romantic notions came later.
Actually, they *do* get an exception. The big outrage isn't about churches. It's about businesses which are owned by Christians or closely affiliated with churches - Hobby Lobby leads the legal action. The exception is limited to 'official' churches only. Hobby Lobby's owners argue that as they are Christians in a church which forbids contraception, their first-amendment protection of their religious beliefs extends to the company they own, and as such the mandated contraception coverage is unconstitutional.
The problem I have with that idea is just that it makes a mockery of the law. There's no point in having a law if anyone can just declare 'I'm religious, I'm exempt!' What's to stop someone from declaring that their religion forbids paying taxes, or a manufacturing company claiming to be exempt from environmental protection laws because it's owners believe the end of the world is due in a matter of years?
The reason they have no dignity is that biology SUCKS. We didn't evolve to live forever. Clams did, jellyfish did, humans didn't. There comes a time when it all falls apart: Your skin sags, your joints seize up, your hearing fails, your eyes fog, your hair falls out. Then your mind starts to go. You spend your final days a trembling wreck in a care home, eating the soft foods your toothless jaw can still handle and interrupting the nurse every five minutes to tell her you need to go home to feed that cat that died twenty years ago. There is no dignity there. Medical technology can slow this process down, and has achieved wonderful things in that field - what was once knocking on death's door is now only middle age, with many fifty-year-olds still in excellent health - but slowing is all it can do. Unless there is a revolution in medicine, it can only delay those inevitable years of senility.
With two problems:
1. Patients can't put it in themselves. Self-injection needs training even for healthy people, and these are not healthy. Stroke victims, arthritic ninety-year-olds, people who couldn't hold a pen.
2. You can't require someone else do it. Many doctors would refuse, considering it a violation of their oath and ethical code. Even if the individual doctor would, hospital policy or professional associations may forbid it.
The closest thing to a solution for that I've found is a morphine pump. The doctor hooks it up, but the patient then has to perform the final act of pressing the button to start it.
But it is vengeance. It is human nature to seek revenge - a simple instinct that evolved long before agriculture, to enforce the social rules of a tribe. People today might call it 'justice' to try to sound more enlightened, but as Wombat demonstrates, it's the same old drive. You can't defeat it without first acknowledging it.
There was a BBC program on this subject. They investigated many historical methods of execution, deciding on which was the 'ideal' method. Criteria were chosen: It had to be reliable, easily administered by persons of little training, not require difficult-to-source materials, clean and painless. The eventual winner was aspixiation with nitrogen, which met all of these criteria. This idea was then presented to the leader of a pro-death-penalty pressure group in the US.
He rejected it immediately, on the grounds that it was inhumane... to the victims. How is it justice, he asked, for a murderer to die peacefully if his victim did not?
There we have the problem of execution. The death penalty has many purposes. It is a deterrent. It is a way to dispose of those too dangerous to ever free. But it is also a way to satisfy people's base desire for revenge, to see the guilty made to suffer slowly and painfully. Nitrogen could have been introduced a century ago with ease - but it isn't politically viable: It's just *too* painless to satisfy that desire to inflict punishment. If the death doesn't hurt, people feel that the scales of karma remain unbalanced.
I imagine that a plastic bag, a hose and some sellotape will do as well as a mask. Nitrogen from a welding supply store, or helium from party supply. But remember these are terminally ill people - some of them will be bed-bound, and many unable to travel without assistance.
Easy enough for a healthy person - helium would work. Just don't get the cheap balloon gas, they dilute it with air. This isn't about healthy people, though - these are terminally ill, many stuck in hospital, some unable to even get out of bed without assistance.
Like most political positions, 'strict constitutionalist' should always be followed by 'so long as this does not conflict with my higher-priority goals.' See, for example, all the people who will in one paragraph decry the way the federal government has taken over healthcare, and in the very next paragraph say that the federal government needs to act to ban gay marriage.
As this one was caught via user-specific codes (Something practical only in online distribution, no good on pressed discs), none of that would have helped.
Population control runs into political difficulties. Firstly because contraception is considered evil by many religious organisations, and secondly because many political groups consider the right to a family to be utterly inalienable and any government attempt to intrude on that, even non-coercively, abhorent. Thus population control can only work when it is either done under-the-radar and indirectly, or by a government which has little need to care how popular the program is (China).
Panem? Check. Circenses? Check. Revolution averted.
You're right. Pedophile enabler is stupid. And yet, it works. Do not underestimate public ignorance and desire for a good old-fashioned moral outrage, or a legitimate target to hate. Pedophiles are the new communists, or witches. A little flimsy evidence is all you need to ruin someone's life. After all, if they won't reveal the key, they must be guilty.
Sort of. He made his fortune in shady businesses, playing right on the edge of legal and illegal.
The US *does* shut down porn sites. Technically, all internet pornography is illegal in the US. It's just a law that no-one bothers to enforce any more. Occasionally a DA or AG will try to prove his family credentials by taking on a porn site, but it's just embarassing even when they win.
He can be both. Dotcom vs the MPAA? Dick vs Asshole. Whoever wins, we win.
In theory, yes - though it'd take some time to be implimented. It'd be a big step though, as it would undermine all trust in the DNS system, and that is something the US can't afford to do right now. The UN is already pressing for a more multinational management - an abuse of power by the US would only prove them right.
There's a procedure to follow, though. Anti-crypto laws are tricky things to get through politically. Doable, but it needs a good excuse, and 'Hollywood isn't rich enough' is not going to do it easily. The obvious justification is child porn. The mere suspicion of child pornography is toxic today, and any acts justified as opposing child porn are near-impossible to argue against without being branded a pedophile-enabler.
Might be related to those phones supporting four to six different mobile network technologies operating in many different bands.
But then the wrong letter might win.
The economic viability determines if people have a reason to care. What's the point campaigning against the government (or corporations, or your neighbour) doing something they can't afford to do it anyway?
Once the accessible oil runs out, I think there might be a lot of that going on.
Programming for the GPU is also trickier - it's a specialised task, and so hiring a programmer experienced in the field is going to be a bit trickier and more expensive than hiring a programmer who can work with general-purpose processors.