I wonder how many of the people who are saying "What's the problem if the death penalty is horribly painful? This guy deserved it!" are also the ones who express horror over the government torturing people to get information from them or spying on everyone just on the off chance that one of those people might be planning something bad. If your government is willing to go to such lengths to get information from people, then do you really want to give that government the ability to kill any prisoner that they deem to be a "waste of taxpayer money"?
First of all, how do you decide who is a "waste of taxpayer money"? That seems to me like a slippery slope that could be applied to any group if the mob so deems it. Don't like a group? Declare their activities illegal and arrest them. Then declare that all they are doing is sitting in jail taking up taxpayer money and execute them to save some cash.
Secondly, what about the estimated 4% of people on death row who are innocent. There are people who, for various reasons (e.g. overzealous prosecutors, incompetent defense attorneys, corrupt police planting/hiding evidence, etc), were convicted of crimes that they didn't commit. They sometimes sit in jail for decades trying to get cleared. Sometimes they do (having lost years/decades of their life), sometimes they don't (cleared after they die in jail or are executed). If you wrongly jail someone, that's bad but you can release them. It's not a 100% payback for the time wrongly spent in prison, but it is something. If you execute an innocent person, you can't "un-execute" them. They are dead and no amount of "Oops, our bad" will change that.
This is why the death penalty - if it is to be kept - should only be applied exceedingly sparingly and only after a TON of legal maneuvers that are skewed towards the defendant not being executed. Better to keep a guilty person alive and in jail than to execute an innocent.
Opening scenes of Star Wars Episode VII: An older Jar-Jar Binks walks through Mos Eisley and says "Meesa so glad me made it past all that craziness unharmed."
Out of nowhere, Gollum jumps on top of Jar-Jar and dismembers him shouting "You ruined my Precious!!!"
The Cantina band stops playing for a bit to watch the spectacle but soon starts up again. Wipe over to the main story after audience applause.
I don't think anyone seriously fears Hulu. They may be owned by the content providers, but that's hurting them, not helping them. Companies like Comcast want to protect their current video services so they don't want Hulu being too innovative. So the offering is doomed to be an also-ran unless they decide to push it no matter what the consequences to "traditional TV."
Who said municipal broadband equals no competition from private companies? And what about the areas not being served by private companies? They try creating municipal broadband efforts and the private companies (who decided not to serve those areas) sue to stop them. How is it a government takeover if the government is giving a service that the private companies decided not to give?
Some cities are trying to do this. Unfortunately, the big ISPs have tossed lawyers at nearly every such project to halt them. Even if the ISPs didn't serve those particular areas, they are of the opinion that municipal broadband is bad because it might compete with them if they decided at some point in the future to serve those areas.
I think we need a strong statement from some government official with the proper authority to clear up that municipal broadband is 100% legal and these lawsuits are ISPs attempting to be anti-competitive. (You don't see UPS and Fed-Ex suing to get the USPS shut down because it's "unfair" for the government to compete with them in delivering mail.)
It's even worse than that. The big monopolies know that the "bad connection issues" aren't likely to blow up in their faces - or, if they do, customers will be powerless to do something about it. If you're Joe User and Netflix won't stream, chances are you'll blame one of two entities: Netflix or your ISP.
If you blame Netflix, you can put pressure on Netflix by threatening to leave. After all, there are competing services such as Amazon Prime. (You can argue that said services might not be as good as Netflix, but they are still alternatives.) So Netflix would feel pressure to do whatever it takes to get the connection "working" again, even if it meant paying the ISP's fast lane bribery fee.
If you blame your ISP, you can try to threaten to leave, but your ISP will just laugh at you. Most Americans have only one or two ISPs in their area. If you leave the one and the other does the same thing, what option do you have? And if you only have access to one ISP, what option do you have? You can ditch all Internet access, but the ISPs know you won't do that. So you're forced to grumble and complain online, but still pay whatever the ISP demands you pay for the level of service they deign to provide you.
The ISPs are essentially playing a game of chicken with Netflix except the ISPs are in an armored SUV and Netflix is riding a bicycle.
Sadly, you might be way off too low. I currently have Time Warner Cable TV and Internet. The only reason we've kept TV so far is that Time Warner gave us a good deal on the TV. We pay $85 a month with this "good deal." If we paid full price, we'd likely be paying $120 or more a month. Of course, at that point, we'd cut cable and save the money. As it stands, cable is hanging on by a thread.
Comcast is trying to spin this as being some kind of big "we won't be a monopoly thanks to this so don't regulate us" concession.
It's effectively carving up the markets between Comcast and Charter, though.
Comcast "gives" Charter 1.4 million subscribers. In addition, Comcast swaps 3 million subscribers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Alabama to Charter in exchange for 1.6 million subscribers in "New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, Maryland, and some smaller areas contiguous to existing Comcast or Time Warner Cable systems." [Source] Then, about 2.5 million customers will be served by a new company that is run 2/3 by Comcast and 1/3 by Charter.
Effectively, Comcast is "dropping" about 4.5 million customers but what they are really doing is carving up the market with Charter so that each won't need to compete with the other. They'll each stay in their own little geographic area and everyone is happy. (Where "everyone" means the cable companies, of course. Not the customers who will see higher and higher bills with little to no competition.)
No, the sensible thing to do is to invest 10% of the company profits into buying politicians to kill solar/renewable energy and then invest 90% of the company profits in raises for the executives for how brilliant they were. Maybe they can drop that last one to 80% and use the 10% remaining to hedge their bets by buying renewable energy companies and suppressing them as much as possible, but that's just playing whack-a-mole. (And it cuts into executive bonuses!) The buying politicians part is key.
Or, alternatively, did those other planets get intelligent life so much earlier that they have progressed past noisy radio transmissions and their existing ones have already traveled past the Earth? It wouldn't do us much good if the aliens radio transmissions passed the Earth during the 1500s.
1) How long ago did Hypothetical Civilization send their last radio transmission before moving to "quieter" forms of communication? If their radio transmissions passed by us during the 1700's, that wouldn't have been detected by us. For all we know, aliens were screaming "Anyone out there?!!!" at Earth in radio waves during the 1500's but we just couldn't hear them.
2) How far away was Hypothetical Civilization when they sent their radio waves. As you pointed out, radio waves degrade over time and you need a progressively larger antenna to pick them up. If you need a Rhode Island sized antenna for 100 light years, what size antenna would we need to detect radio waves from 500 light years away? 1,000? 10,000? At what point do we need to turn our entire solar system into a giant antenna (something that is obviously way beyond our current technological capacity) just to pick up some faint radio signal from a far away Hypothetical Civilization?
It wasn't too long ago that we debated whether exoplanets existed at all. We only discovered the first exoplanet in 1995. We've gotten better at detecting them but Earth-like planets were beyond us until very recently. (Earth-like moons of bigger planets are still beyond our capabilities.) I don't think we can tell what the atmosphere of those Earth-like planets that we can detect is like, much less whether they are inhabited by intelligent alien life.
Given our lack of detection capability, it's not surprising that we haven't spotted hundreds of alien worlds inhabited by intelligent life. They could be out there but we wouldn't be able to see them at all.
I've long wondered if just an encoding schema combined with a foreign (in this case, alien) language would be enough to render a communication indistinguishable from noise. Suppose I took a communication (I don't specify text, photo, audio, or video - it could be any of those), encoded it using a schema I don't specify and possibly compress it using a compression algorithm I don't specify. Could you tell that that file contained actual data versus 99 other files of similar size that were pure random nonsense?
Wait. Millionaires are the middle class now? *Looks at bank account which is FAR from $1 million* I guess I can't afford to be in the middle class anymore.
There are likely multiple factors preventing alien communication.
First is time. A civilization needs to survive long enough to develop radio communication. Too far along, though, and they might develop a form of communication that is undetectable to us. Furthermore we needed to have been developed enough to listen. A broadcast hitting us in the 1600s wouldn't have been detected by us.
The second is space. It's huge. (Insert HHGTTG quote here.) A civilization might need to direct its communication near the Earth or - if it is too far away - the transmission might be too weak.
Finally, there's the language/encoding barrier. Suppose I presented you with a hundred files and said that one contained a message but didn't tell you what language the message was in, whether it was audio/video/image, or how it was encoded? Would you be able to tell which one had the message and what the message is? Now add in the complications of alien languages & encoding schemes.
With all of those combined, it's no wonder we haven't found intelligent life. Even if such life is very common, it would be tricky to detect it (at least at our technological level).
Real political reform would mean less power for the Democrat and Republican parties. Thus, we will get political reform like the TSA provides security: Just enough to make the public think something is being done while actually being completely ineffective (and ideally giving big grants to companies that the politicians are cozy with to garner more campaign contributions).
To make the inevitable car analogy, suppose you drive to Grocery Store A and buy $50 worth of groceries a week. Is the cost of your groceries really $50 + the full price of owning a car (purchase cost, gas cost, maintenance cost, etc)? Or is the true cost $50 + some fraction of the car's cost (the gas it costs you to drive to the store plus some negligible amount of purchase/maintenance costs)? Unless the only time you use your car is to drive to the grocery store and you would not own a car otherwise, it would be ridiculous to state that your entire monthly "car cost" needs to be tacked on to your grocery bill.
In addition, Internet service is required for many other things. If I buy something from Amazon.com for $20, is the real cost of the item $20 + my ISP bill? When I post on Slashdot from home, is Slashdot really costing me my monthly ISP costs? Or do they get divided up based on usage and the monthly ISP costs?
Almost everyone has Internet access nowadays. Most people use it for various purposes: E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Slashdot, Netflix, Amazon.com purchases, etc. I doubt many people pay a monthly fee for Internet access and *ONLY* use it for their Netflix service. Maybe those people can claim their Netflix bill as being $7.99 + Internet service, but they are the exception, not the rule. Everyone else would calculate "true cost" by taking some fraction of their Internet service and adding it to Netflix's $7.99 a month.
Given that the uploaded data would have included IEP information (including medical diagnoses), disciplinary information, and even teen pregnancy information, all those would have been possible.
Of course, InBloom has been shut down but some of the data had been uploaded. What happened to that data? Who has it now and will it be deleted or used for "other purposes"?
Yes, statistically non-existent, but the question still remains how you could have security so "tight" that you can't take a bottle of shampoo on-board (for fear that you'll squirt it on someone's eyes?!!!) but a person can sneak over the fence surrounding the airport, get all the way to the plane, and climb up into the wheel well undetected. Was this a one-time lapse in security or is the security around the plane itself as they prep it for takeoff just that horrible? And if the latter, why not beef up that security and leave the passengers alone? (Where "leave the passengers alone" means revert to pre-911 passenger screening measures.)
To be fair to Prime (which we have but don't like as much as we like Netflix), it went up $20 a year. Netflix is talking about a $1-2 a month increase which would work out to $12-24 more a year. So the Prime and Netflix price increases are in the same ballpark.
Plus, unlike the different cable providers, these services actually compete. Sure, Netflix might have exclusive Show A while Amazon has exclusive Show B, but they are both vying for our entertainment dollars. Right now, the cable companies have divided up the market into exclusive zones so there is only one cable operator per location. (There might be some overlap, but that's the exception, not the rule.)
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many of the people who are saying "What's the problem if the death penalty is horribly painful? This guy deserved it!" are also the ones who express horror over the government torturing people to get information from them or spying on everyone just on the off chance that one of those people might be planning something bad. If your government is willing to go to such lengths to get information from people, then do you really want to give that government the ability to kill any prisoner that they deem to be a "waste of taxpayer money"?
Two problems with this:
First of all, how do you decide who is a "waste of taxpayer money"? That seems to me like a slippery slope that could be applied to any group if the mob so deems it. Don't like a group? Declare their activities illegal and arrest them. Then declare that all they are doing is sitting in jail taking up taxpayer money and execute them to save some cash.
Secondly, what about the estimated 4% of people on death row who are innocent. There are people who, for various reasons (e.g. overzealous prosecutors, incompetent defense attorneys, corrupt police planting/hiding evidence, etc), were convicted of crimes that they didn't commit. They sometimes sit in jail for decades trying to get cleared. Sometimes they do (having lost years/decades of their life), sometimes they don't (cleared after they die in jail or are executed). If you wrongly jail someone, that's bad but you can release them. It's not a 100% payback for the time wrongly spent in prison, but it is something. If you execute an innocent person, you can't "un-execute" them. They are dead and no amount of "Oops, our bad" will change that.
This is why the death penalty - if it is to be kept - should only be applied exceedingly sparingly and only after a TON of legal maneuvers that are skewed towards the defendant not being executed. Better to keep a guilty person alive and in jail than to execute an innocent.
Opening scenes of Star Wars Episode VII: An older Jar-Jar Binks walks through Mos Eisley and says "Meesa so glad me made it past all that craziness unharmed."
Out of nowhere, Gollum jumps on top of Jar-Jar and dismembers him shouting "You ruined my Precious!!!"
The Cantina band stops playing for a bit to watch the spectacle but soon starts up again. Wipe over to the main story after audience applause.
I don't think anyone seriously fears Hulu. They may be owned by the content providers, but that's hurting them, not helping them. Companies like Comcast want to protect their current video services so they don't want Hulu being too innovative. So the offering is doomed to be an also-ran unless they decide to push it no matter what the consequences to "traditional TV."
Who said municipal broadband equals no competition from private companies? And what about the areas not being served by private companies? They try creating municipal broadband efforts and the private companies (who decided not to serve those areas) sue to stop them. How is it a government takeover if the government is giving a service that the private companies decided not to give?
Some cities are trying to do this. Unfortunately, the big ISPs have tossed lawyers at nearly every such project to halt them. Even if the ISPs didn't serve those particular areas, they are of the opinion that municipal broadband is bad because it might compete with them if they decided at some point in the future to serve those areas.
I think we need a strong statement from some government official with the proper authority to clear up that municipal broadband is 100% legal and these lawsuits are ISPs attempting to be anti-competitive. (You don't see UPS and Fed-Ex suing to get the USPS shut down because it's "unfair" for the government to compete with them in delivering mail.)
It's even worse than that. The big monopolies know that the "bad connection issues" aren't likely to blow up in their faces - or, if they do, customers will be powerless to do something about it. If you're Joe User and Netflix won't stream, chances are you'll blame one of two entities: Netflix or your ISP.
If you blame Netflix, you can put pressure on Netflix by threatening to leave. After all, there are competing services such as Amazon Prime. (You can argue that said services might not be as good as Netflix, but they are still alternatives.) So Netflix would feel pressure to do whatever it takes to get the connection "working" again, even if it meant paying the ISP's fast lane bribery fee.
If you blame your ISP, you can try to threaten to leave, but your ISP will just laugh at you. Most Americans have only one or two ISPs in their area. If you leave the one and the other does the same thing, what option do you have? And if you only have access to one ISP, what option do you have? You can ditch all Internet access, but the ISPs know you won't do that. So you're forced to grumble and complain online, but still pay whatever the ISP demands you pay for the level of service they deign to provide you.
The ISPs are essentially playing a game of chicken with Netflix except the ISPs are in an armored SUV and Netflix is riding a bicycle.
So what you're saying is that the Vogons destroyed Flight 370?
Sadly, you might be way off too low. I currently have Time Warner Cable TV and Internet. The only reason we've kept TV so far is that Time Warner gave us a good deal on the TV. We pay $85 a month with this "good deal." If we paid full price, we'd likely be paying $120 or more a month. Of course, at that point, we'd cut cable and save the money. As it stands, cable is hanging on by a thread.
Comcast is trying to spin this as being some kind of big "we won't be a monopoly thanks to this so don't regulate us" concession.
It's effectively carving up the markets between Comcast and Charter, though.
Comcast "gives" Charter 1.4 million subscribers. In addition, Comcast swaps 3 million subscribers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Alabama to Charter in exchange for 1.6 million subscribers in "New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, Maryland, and some smaller areas contiguous to existing Comcast or Time Warner Cable systems." [Source] Then, about 2.5 million customers will be served by a new company that is run 2/3 by Comcast and 1/3 by Charter.
Effectively, Comcast is "dropping" about 4.5 million customers but what they are really doing is carving up the market with Charter so that each won't need to compete with the other. They'll each stay in their own little geographic area and everyone is happy. (Where "everyone" means the cable companies, of course. Not the customers who will see higher and higher bills with little to no competition.)
No, the sensible thing to do is to invest 10% of the company profits into buying politicians to kill solar/renewable energy and then invest 90% of the company profits in raises for the executives for how brilliant they were. Maybe they can drop that last one to 80% and use the 10% remaining to hedge their bets by buying renewable energy companies and suppressing them as much as possible, but that's just playing whack-a-mole. (And it cuts into executive bonuses!) The buying politicians part is key.
Or they have to use a $5 wrench. Either one.
http://xkcd.com/538/
I have altered the canon. Pray I don't alter it further!
Or, alternatively, did those other planets get intelligent life so much earlier that they have progressed past noisy radio transmissions and their existing ones have already traveled past the Earth? It wouldn't do us much good if the aliens radio transmissions passed the Earth during the 1500s.
The problem is that:
1) How long ago did Hypothetical Civilization send their last radio transmission before moving to "quieter" forms of communication? If their radio transmissions passed by us during the 1700's, that wouldn't have been detected by us. For all we know, aliens were screaming "Anyone out there?!!!" at Earth in radio waves during the 1500's but we just couldn't hear them.
2) How far away was Hypothetical Civilization when they sent their radio waves. As you pointed out, radio waves degrade over time and you need a progressively larger antenna to pick them up. If you need a Rhode Island sized antenna for 100 light years, what size antenna would we need to detect radio waves from 500 light years away? 1,000? 10,000? At what point do we need to turn our entire solar system into a giant antenna (something that is obviously way beyond our current technological capacity) just to pick up some faint radio signal from a far away Hypothetical Civilization?
It wasn't too long ago that we debated whether exoplanets existed at all. We only discovered the first exoplanet in 1995. We've gotten better at detecting them but Earth-like planets were beyond us until very recently. (Earth-like moons of bigger planets are still beyond our capabilities.) I don't think we can tell what the atmosphere of those Earth-like planets that we can detect is like, much less whether they are inhabited by intelligent alien life.
Given our lack of detection capability, it's not surprising that we haven't spotted hundreds of alien worlds inhabited by intelligent life. They could be out there but we wouldn't be able to see them at all.
I've long wondered if just an encoding schema combined with a foreign (in this case, alien) language would be enough to render a communication indistinguishable from noise. Suppose I took a communication (I don't specify text, photo, audio, or video - it could be any of those), encoded it using a schema I don't specify and possibly compress it using a compression algorithm I don't specify. Could you tell that that file contained actual data versus 99 other files of similar size that were pure random nonsense?
Wait. Millionaires are the middle class now? *Looks at bank account which is FAR from $1 million* I guess I can't afford to be in the middle class anymore.
There are likely multiple factors preventing alien communication.
First is time. A civilization needs to survive long enough to develop radio communication. Too far along, though, and they might develop a form of communication that is undetectable to us. Furthermore we needed to have been developed enough to listen. A broadcast hitting us in the 1600s wouldn't have been detected by us.
The second is space. It's huge. (Insert HHGTTG quote here.) A civilization might need to direct its communication near the Earth or - if it is too far away - the transmission might be too weak.
Finally, there's the language/encoding barrier. Suppose I presented you with a hundred files and said that one contained a message but didn't tell you what language the message was in, whether it was audio/video/image, or how it was encoded? Would you be able to tell which one had the message and what the message is? Now add in the complications of alien languages & encoding schemes.
With all of those combined, it's no wonder we haven't found intelligent life. Even if such life is very common, it would be tricky to detect it (at least at our technological level).
Real political reform would mean less power for the Democrat and Republican parties. Thus, we will get political reform like the TSA provides security: Just enough to make the public think something is being done while actually being completely ineffective (and ideally giving big grants to companies that the politicians are cozy with to garner more campaign contributions).
To make the inevitable car analogy, suppose you drive to Grocery Store A and buy $50 worth of groceries a week. Is the cost of your groceries really $50 + the full price of owning a car (purchase cost, gas cost, maintenance cost, etc)? Or is the true cost $50 + some fraction of the car's cost (the gas it costs you to drive to the store plus some negligible amount of purchase/maintenance costs)? Unless the only time you use your car is to drive to the grocery store and you would not own a car otherwise, it would be ridiculous to state that your entire monthly "car cost" needs to be tacked on to your grocery bill.
In addition, Internet service is required for many other things. If I buy something from Amazon.com for $20, is the real cost of the item $20 + my ISP bill? When I post on Slashdot from home, is Slashdot really costing me my monthly ISP costs? Or do they get divided up based on usage and the monthly ISP costs?
Almost everyone has Internet access nowadays. Most people use it for various purposes: E-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Slashdot, Netflix, Amazon.com purchases, etc. I doubt many people pay a monthly fee for Internet access and *ONLY* use it for their Netflix service. Maybe those people can claim their Netflix bill as being $7.99 + Internet service, but they are the exception, not the rule. Everyone else would calculate "true cost" by taking some fraction of their Internet service and adding it to Netflix's $7.99 a month.
Given that the uploaded data would have included IEP information (including medical diagnoses), disciplinary information, and even teen pregnancy information, all those would have been possible.
Of course, InBloom has been shut down but some of the data had been uploaded. What happened to that data? Who has it now and will it be deleted or used for "other purposes"?
Yes, statistically non-existent, but the question still remains how you could have security so "tight" that you can't take a bottle of shampoo on-board (for fear that you'll squirt it on someone's eyes?!!!) but a person can sneak over the fence surrounding the airport, get all the way to the plane, and climb up into the wheel well undetected. Was this a one-time lapse in security or is the security around the plane itself as they prep it for takeoff just that horrible? And if the latter, why not beef up that security and leave the passengers alone? (Where "leave the passengers alone" means revert to pre-911 passenger screening measures.)
To be fair to Prime (which we have but don't like as much as we like Netflix), it went up $20 a year. Netflix is talking about a $1-2 a month increase which would work out to $12-24 more a year. So the Prime and Netflix price increases are in the same ballpark.
Plus, unlike the different cable providers, these services actually compete. Sure, Netflix might have exclusive Show A while Amazon has exclusive Show B, but they are both vying for our entertainment dollars. Right now, the cable companies have divided up the market into exclusive zones so there is only one cable operator per location. (There might be some overlap, but that's the exception, not the rule.)