The Constitution specifically follows its version of that clause with "without due process" (amendment 5):
No person shall be... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
For better or worse (and clearly "worse" in this case), due process was followed. The best legal (as opposed to moral) argument against the death penalty is that due process isn't always followed scrupulously: many cases are overturned only by heroic efforts of lawyers, frequently working for little or nothing because the people who had money are unlikely to have received a capital sentence in the first place. Our system of justice seems poor at granting due process under the best of circumstances, and one could argue that there simply isn't due process that can justify the death penalty.
The "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" line is from the Declaration of Independence: a noble and important founding document, but lacking the force of law for a reason. That's not how or why it was written. For better or worse, the Constitution was deliberately crafted with "due process" in mind, and they clearly considered the death penalty to be a valid option.
The show was at its best when it used its absurd, unique situation for black comedy. It got to play around with very dark themes about loneliness and despair. That could be bitterly funny.
Unfortunately, it also kinda ran its course after the first couple of seasons. They had a few other funny ideas, driven in large part by top-notch acting, but it was much more pedestrian in the kinds of jokes they could tell. They kept introducing new characters into a show whose original point had been, "What do you do if you are literally the last man alive in the entire universe?", and that rather undercut what made the show work.
By the end it was decidedly played out; they were just re-treading well-worn sci-fi parody themes (or simply being crude for the laughs). I hear there's even more to come, and I'll probably watch it, but I doubt I'll like it.
I don't know what the comparable figures are in the UK, but I suspect that they too are moving towards getting their entertainment via media that make the broadcast oligopoly irrelevant. You probably don't care about broadcast providers there and wouldn't care about it if you moved there.
It also doesn't mean it can't be better. We're seeing metabolic diseases at younger ages; we're able to keep people alive longer but they're not healthy. Life expectancy is even starting to drop; not dramatically, but there's reason to think we can do better.
Too little food is definitely bad, and leads to malnutrition. But we're getting people who are malnourished because they have too much food, and of the wrong kind. It's not that hard to do better, but people need to pay attention.
I run with NoScript on Firefox, and unfortunately I'm finding more and more web sites are unusable without Javascript enabled not just for them (and the cloud provider, who could be serving up god-knows-what) but for zillions of "partners". I don't know what those partners are providing, either: probably mostly ancillary crap but the page won't render until it's downloaded.
I keep a NoScripted Firefox for any time I'm visiting web sites that I don't know beforehand; if they don't render then I don't need it that badly. But on my work computers, where I'm browsing only sites that I have reason to believe have things I need and aren't too terribly likely to be hijacked, I've found I just had to turn NoScript off.
That sucks, because the fact is that the vast majority of sites do shit with Javascript that the site would be just plain better off without. I don't object to their need to earn a living by feeding me ads, which is why I don't run with an ad blocker, but Javascript is very easy to abuse, and too many of them create abusive design.
Well... dollars do suck from a security standpoint. There's the paper bits, which are inconvenient in large amounts. And there's the usual electronic methods, whose security is practically criminal: the idea that somebody could find my wallet and use it to drain my bank account, or incur five-figure debts with the onus of disproof on me, is utterly absurd.
Not that Bitcoin is automatically all that much better: it's still rather inconvenient and its security apparently rather doubtful. Rolling out chip-and-PIN in the US might be a better solution, building on the existing infrastructure rather than having to create a whole new one. (Especially since Bitcoin's version of it appears to be heavily based on awarding large profits to early adopters rather than just about creating a better infrastructure.)
Ah, ok. Somehow, I find that less neat, if it's just a built-in Dustbuster. Still, as one whose car is in DIRE need of a vacuuming, I gotta say I'd be glad to have the system there.
I live in Maryland. We get salt on the roads, but only a few times a year. Surely it would be better to have it washed off, but the rain seems to do the job well enough. I have yet to have rust as a significant factor.
I find that the exterior of my car more or less takes care of itself. Sure, it could be better, but it rains and the worst of the crud is washed off. And then the mud kicked up puts more crud on; even if I did put effort into washing it, it would be nearly as dirty within weeks. I practically never wash my car, and they last well over a decade. It's not the limiting factor in the car's life span.
What I'd really like it something that made the *interior* cleaner. Of course it's not going to neaten up my tool boxes and spare clothes and fast-food wrappers, but if it could somehow at least deal better with stains and dripped mud, that would make me happy.
I gave strong consideration to the Honda Element for just that reason; it's designed to be hosed out. I ended up going with the Fit for the mileage. And it could really use some detailing. I get my car cleaned every so often not for the outside, but because they also do the inside.
The money does not flow into the politician's bank accounts. That's why it's not a bribe. They are not getting wealthy off of it; even the revolving door promises that they'll get a lucrative position after they leave Congress can't really explain it since that is often years or decades away.
The politicians are mostly wealthy to start with, and their income sources are fairly obvious. They make money the old fashioned way, being lawyers and executives with comical salaries, which they spin into even bigger investments. The politicians who start poor tend to remain poor. (Or rather, middle class. It's practically impossible for an actually poor person to be elected. But they're poor compared to the millionaire's club which makes up about half of Congress.)
I don't think I agree with your interpretation of this event. The MPAA discovered that even though they are sympathetic to Democratic lawmakers on most issues, they disagree on the pocketbook issue that makes the MPAA different from the sum of a bunch of Hollywood lefties. Those lefties are probably still supporting Democrats as individuals, but their collective action on financial matters runs to right-wing, pro-business, anti-consumer tactics.
So they're probably fighting against themselves, and donating out of both sides of their pockets. Which actually isn't uncommon for people whose social consciences say one thing but whose livelihoods say another.
They weren't buying the Democrats; they don't want to buy the Republicans. Republicans want to give the MPAA what they want; that's the way they actually believe the world works. So they're going to put money into getting Republicans elected over Democrats. Which is going to have effects on a lot of areas other than IP matters, and I think it's going to make them very unhappy.
When you talk about the "mindless voters", I'm not sure you're disagreeing with me at all. The voters have the power to fix it, or at least make a change in the individual, and that would create powerful incentives for the one in power to be different.
Isn't that counter to the point? I thought the whole idea of Lego was to be able to buy many instances of a few standardized, interchangeable components and assemble them into anything you want.
If you had a machine that could print custom Lego parts, wouldn't you just skip the Lego entirely and just 3D print whatever the final thing is supposed to be?
Sorry, I didn't play much with Legos and I'm not part of Lego culture. I infer from reading Slashdot that people really enjoy making unlikely things out of them, for the lulz, which is cool. So I apologize for being naive, but I don't understand why you'd want custom Lego parts.
I *do* insist that the problem is with the voters. If the voters were that irate about the politicians, they'd vote them out. Even if the new ones were just as bad, the voters would express their ire by voting them out, too.
Political donations don't buy votes. No politician is going to risk going to jail for taking bribes.
What political donations buy is the election of candidates who are sympathetic to you without having to be paid. They can't give money directly to the candidates anyway. The unlimited funds go to "uncoordinated" separate groups who spend it not on limousines and fact-finding tours to tropical islands but on campaign ads.
That's the point of connection. They're not buying the politicians. They're buying the voters. And they're buying them not with money, but with whatever tools of mental manipulation the ad-makers can dream up. They spend the money to blanket the airwaves.
All the voters have to do is to think, question whether the ads are telling the truth, and wonder why if they can form an objective picture from two biased, manipulated sets of mutually contradictory ads. That doesn't seem like a lot to ask, but the fact that the incumbents are repeatedly returned to office is a strong clue that they're not.
Maybe it would be futile and ineffective to keep turfing out politicians in favor of new ones. But it's not an experiment the voters have tried. If they did, maybe the politicians would change the way they operate; I don't know. I do know that your picture of how the process works is deeply flawed, and most voters seem equally uninterested in actually learning how it does work.
Your outrage at the politicians is too easy. They're doing what the voters tell them to do. If the voters are doing what the money is telling them to do, don't tell it to the politicians, or to me. Tell it to them. If you can figure out how to get them to listen, I'm all for it.
The discovery of pulsars rotating around each other by Hulse and Taylor was a major confirmation of general relativity because of the way they were radiating energy in gravitational waves. Is there any way to use black holes to confirm this even more? Would it be something we could help "point" a gravitational wave detector at?
(Sorry, IANAP, so I apologize if this is a stupid question.)
I'm just saying there ARE a lot of people who really want that. I'm not one of them; I actually kind of prefer things "spoiled". (Hell, if I'd waited until Lost had finished completely, I might have skipped it altogether and had a few dozen hours of my life back.)
I do think it's a real part of culture to discuss TV that's on Right Now. Not my thing, but I can see why a lot of other people are into it. Perhaps fewer than they think; maybe a lot of people would be happier ditching the cable and getting Netflix. I think the cable providers definitely fear that.
But I don't get the hate for DVRs; people time-shift things a few hours or a few days and can still get in on the conversation. Yeah, if you let it go for months you might as well just wait until it's on Netflix (though a LOT of Netflix material is still DVD-only, and I still maintain the mail service).
You can't put a f/1.4 on this for shallower depth of field and better low light performance, or a 10mm wide angle, or a fish eye, or a better telephoto lens, or a tilt/shift for architecture.
I thought the point of this contraption was that those were things you could do after the exposure (except perhaps for the "low light performance"). Am I off base?
They had the (dubious) advantage of having already been exposed to whatever was in the local wells. You get the same thing today: go to any third-world country and you'll get sick drinking what the locals drink. After that, your immune system will be primed to whatever they've got.
The worst offenders are the wells contaminated with human waste, which brings you whatever bugs everybody else has. A good well is deep enough to avoid that contamination, and you keep your latrines downstream of it. Still... every once in a while you'd get it really bad, especially in cities, where space for both wells and latrines are limited.
It's cheaper because it's giving you second-run content. If you want to talk about the ending of last night's Mad Men or bet with your coworkers about who's going to win whatever reality TV is most popular, you need cable. News and sports are available for free OTA, but your selection is very limited.
Cable gets to charge a premium price, even with commercials, because the traffic will bear it to have that content right now.
If you're willing to wait to know how Lost turned out until a year after everybody else (like I am), Netflix is indeed a bargain compared to cable. Its back catalog makes it even more valuable, though for me at least it didn't take all that long to see everything I wanted to see. Plus the lack of commercials. But if you're like a lot of people, access to current content is worth paying the price.
I was wondering about that. If you've got well-seasoned, knot-free, straight logs it splits easily enough with a plain old maul. This may have an advantage over that, but it seems like trying to improve on a situation that's already good enough.
As the GP says, if you're splitting by hand, you're already choosing to do a job by hand that really can be efficiently outsourced to a machine. (And given the high price of this axe, one that's not necessarily all that much more expensive.) The thwack of splitting can be quite cheerful; you feel like you've accomplished something.
I'd like to see it applied to some of the crap I've split in my time, where it takes a dozen carefully-placed whacks to get it to go (and sometimes, not even then). That's not fun.
Slashdot Mirror
The Constitution specifically follows its version of that clause with "without due process" (amendment 5):
No person shall be ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
For better or worse (and clearly "worse" in this case), due process was followed. The best legal (as opposed to moral) argument against the death penalty is that due process isn't always followed scrupulously: many cases are overturned only by heroic efforts of lawyers, frequently working for little or nothing because the people who had money are unlikely to have received a capital sentence in the first place. Our system of justice seems poor at granting due process under the best of circumstances, and one could argue that there simply isn't due process that can justify the death penalty.
The "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" line is from the Declaration of Independence: a noble and important founding document, but lacking the force of law for a reason. That's not how or why it was written. For better or worse, the Constitution was deliberately crafted with "due process" in mind, and they clearly considered the death penalty to be a valid option.
The show was at its best when it used its absurd, unique situation for black comedy. It got to play around with very dark themes about loneliness and despair. That could be bitterly funny.
Unfortunately, it also kinda ran its course after the first couple of seasons. They had a few other funny ideas, driven in large part by top-notch acting, but it was much more pedestrian in the kinds of jokes they could tell. They kept introducing new characters into a show whose original point had been, "What do you do if you are literally the last man alive in the entire universe?", and that rather undercut what made the show work.
By the end it was decidedly played out; they were just re-treading well-worn sci-fi parody themes (or simply being crude for the laughs). I hear there's even more to come, and I'll probably watch it, but I doubt I'll like it.
How's it working out for you? Less than 10% of Americans still go with OTA broadcasts.
I don't know what the comparable figures are in the UK, but I suspect that they too are moving towards getting their entertainment via media that make the broadcast oligopoly irrelevant. You probably don't care about broadcast providers there and wouldn't care about it if you moved there.
It also doesn't mean it can't be better. We're seeing metabolic diseases at younger ages; we're able to keep people alive longer but they're not healthy. Life expectancy is even starting to drop; not dramatically, but there's reason to think we can do better.
Too little food is definitely bad, and leads to malnutrition. But we're getting people who are malnourished because they have too much food, and of the wrong kind. It's not that hard to do better, but people need to pay attention.
I run with NoScript on Firefox, and unfortunately I'm finding more and more web sites are unusable without Javascript enabled not just for them (and the cloud provider, who could be serving up god-knows-what) but for zillions of "partners". I don't know what those partners are providing, either: probably mostly ancillary crap but the page won't render until it's downloaded.
I keep a NoScripted Firefox for any time I'm visiting web sites that I don't know beforehand; if they don't render then I don't need it that badly. But on my work computers, where I'm browsing only sites that I have reason to believe have things I need and aren't too terribly likely to be hijacked, I've found I just had to turn NoScript off.
That sucks, because the fact is that the vast majority of sites do shit with Javascript that the site would be just plain better off without. I don't object to their need to earn a living by feeding me ads, which is why I don't run with an ad blocker, but Javascript is very easy to abuse, and too many of them create abusive design.
Well... dollars do suck from a security standpoint. There's the paper bits, which are inconvenient in large amounts. And there's the usual electronic methods, whose security is practically criminal: the idea that somebody could find my wallet and use it to drain my bank account, or incur five-figure debts with the onus of disproof on me, is utterly absurd.
Not that Bitcoin is automatically all that much better: it's still rather inconvenient and its security apparently rather doubtful. Rolling out chip-and-PIN in the US might be a better solution, building on the existing infrastructure rather than having to create a whole new one. (Especially since Bitcoin's version of it appears to be heavily based on awarding large profits to early adopters rather than just about creating a better infrastructure.)
Ah, ok. Somehow, I find that less neat, if it's just a built-in Dustbuster. Still, as one whose car is in DIRE need of a vacuuming, I gotta say I'd be glad to have the system there.
I live in Maryland. We get salt on the roads, but only a few times a year. Surely it would be better to have it washed off, but the rain seems to do the job well enough. I have yet to have rust as a significant factor.
How does that work? Is it tied in to engine vacuum? Or is it just plugged in to the electrical system?
I find that the exterior of my car more or less takes care of itself. Sure, it could be better, but it rains and the worst of the crud is washed off. And then the mud kicked up puts more crud on; even if I did put effort into washing it, it would be nearly as dirty within weeks. I practically never wash my car, and they last well over a decade. It's not the limiting factor in the car's life span.
What I'd really like it something that made the *interior* cleaner. Of course it's not going to neaten up my tool boxes and spare clothes and fast-food wrappers, but if it could somehow at least deal better with stains and dripped mud, that would make me happy.
I gave strong consideration to the Honda Element for just that reason; it's designed to be hosed out. I ended up going with the Fit for the mileage. And it could really use some detailing. I get my car cleaned every so often not for the outside, but because they also do the inside.
The money does not flow into the politician's bank accounts. That's why it's not a bribe. They are not getting wealthy off of it; even the revolving door promises that they'll get a lucrative position after they leave Congress can't really explain it since that is often years or decades away.
The politicians are mostly wealthy to start with, and their income sources are fairly obvious. They make money the old fashioned way, being lawyers and executives with comical salaries, which they spin into even bigger investments. The politicians who start poor tend to remain poor. (Or rather, middle class. It's practically impossible for an actually poor person to be elected. But they're poor compared to the millionaire's club which makes up about half of Congress.)
I don't think I agree with your interpretation of this event. The MPAA discovered that even though they are sympathetic to Democratic lawmakers on most issues, they disagree on the pocketbook issue that makes the MPAA different from the sum of a bunch of Hollywood lefties. Those lefties are probably still supporting Democrats as individuals, but their collective action on financial matters runs to right-wing, pro-business, anti-consumer tactics.
So they're probably fighting against themselves, and donating out of both sides of their pockets. Which actually isn't uncommon for people whose social consciences say one thing but whose livelihoods say another.
They weren't buying the Democrats; they don't want to buy the Republicans. Republicans want to give the MPAA what they want; that's the way they actually believe the world works. So they're going to put money into getting Republicans elected over Democrats. Which is going to have effects on a lot of areas other than IP matters, and I think it's going to make them very unhappy.
Cool. Thanks.
When you talk about the "mindless voters", I'm not sure you're disagreeing with me at all. The voters have the power to fix it, or at least make a change in the individual, and that would create powerful incentives for the one in power to be different.
Isn't that counter to the point? I thought the whole idea of Lego was to be able to buy many instances of a few standardized, interchangeable components and assemble them into anything you want.
If you had a machine that could print custom Lego parts, wouldn't you just skip the Lego entirely and just 3D print whatever the final thing is supposed to be?
Sorry, I didn't play much with Legos and I'm not part of Lego culture. I infer from reading Slashdot that people really enjoy making unlikely things out of them, for the lulz, which is cool. So I apologize for being naive, but I don't understand why you'd want custom Lego parts.
I *do* insist that the problem is with the voters. If the voters were that irate about the politicians, they'd vote them out. Even if the new ones were just as bad, the voters would express their ire by voting them out, too.
Political donations don't buy votes. No politician is going to risk going to jail for taking bribes.
What political donations buy is the election of candidates who are sympathetic to you without having to be paid. They can't give money directly to the candidates anyway. The unlimited funds go to "uncoordinated" separate groups who spend it not on limousines and fact-finding tours to tropical islands but on campaign ads.
That's the point of connection. They're not buying the politicians. They're buying the voters. And they're buying them not with money, but with whatever tools of mental manipulation the ad-makers can dream up. They spend the money to blanket the airwaves.
All the voters have to do is to think, question whether the ads are telling the truth, and wonder why if they can form an objective picture from two biased, manipulated sets of mutually contradictory ads. That doesn't seem like a lot to ask, but the fact that the incumbents are repeatedly returned to office is a strong clue that they're not.
Maybe it would be futile and ineffective to keep turfing out politicians in favor of new ones. But it's not an experiment the voters have tried. If they did, maybe the politicians would change the way they operate; I don't know. I do know that your picture of how the process works is deeply flawed, and most voters seem equally uninterested in actually learning how it does work.
Your outrage at the politicians is too easy. They're doing what the voters tell them to do. If the voters are doing what the money is telling them to do, don't tell it to the politicians, or to me. Tell it to them. If you can figure out how to get them to listen, I'm all for it.
The discovery of pulsars rotating around each other by Hulse and Taylor was a major confirmation of general relativity because of the way they were radiating energy in gravitational waves. Is there any way to use black holes to confirm this even more? Would it be something we could help "point" a gravitational wave detector at?
(Sorry, IANAP, so I apologize if this is a stupid question.)
I'm just saying there ARE a lot of people who really want that. I'm not one of them; I actually kind of prefer things "spoiled". (Hell, if I'd waited until Lost had finished completely, I might have skipped it altogether and had a few dozen hours of my life back.)
I do think it's a real part of culture to discuss TV that's on Right Now. Not my thing, but I can see why a lot of other people are into it. Perhaps fewer than they think; maybe a lot of people would be happier ditching the cable and getting Netflix. I think the cable providers definitely fear that.
But I don't get the hate for DVRs; people time-shift things a few hours or a few days and can still get in on the conversation. Yeah, if you let it go for months you might as well just wait until it's on Netflix (though a LOT of Netflix material is still DVD-only, and I still maintain the mail service).
Thanks! I'd mod you "informative" but obviously... (It's actually giving me a mod drop-down box, but I know it wouldn't really work.)
You can't put a f/1.4 on this for shallower depth of field and better low light performance, or a 10mm wide angle, or a fish eye, or a better telephoto lens, or a tilt/shift for architecture.
I thought the point of this contraption was that those were things you could do after the exposure (except perhaps for the "low light performance"). Am I off base?
They had the (dubious) advantage of having already been exposed to whatever was in the local wells. You get the same thing today: go to any third-world country and you'll get sick drinking what the locals drink. After that, your immune system will be primed to whatever they've got.
The worst offenders are the wells contaminated with human waste, which brings you whatever bugs everybody else has. A good well is deep enough to avoid that contamination, and you keep your latrines downstream of it. Still... every once in a while you'd get it really bad, especially in cities, where space for both wells and latrines are limited.
Plus the beer had calories; it was a way of preserving grains in a ready-to-use form. It was more "thin gruel" than "beverage".
It's cheaper because it's giving you second-run content. If you want to talk about the ending of last night's Mad Men or bet with your coworkers about who's going to win whatever reality TV is most popular, you need cable. News and sports are available for free OTA, but your selection is very limited.
Cable gets to charge a premium price, even with commercials, because the traffic will bear it to have that content right now.
If you're willing to wait to know how Lost turned out until a year after everybody else (like I am), Netflix is indeed a bargain compared to cable. Its back catalog makes it even more valuable, though for me at least it didn't take all that long to see everything I wanted to see. Plus the lack of commercials. But if you're like a lot of people, access to current content is worth paying the price.
It's a lot more fun when you're splitting a few logs for a long weekend. It's a lot less fun when you're doing cord after cord for a whole winter!
As they say, a wood stove keeps you warm so many ways: once when you cut it, then when you haul it, then when you stack it...
I was wondering about that. If you've got well-seasoned, knot-free, straight logs it splits easily enough with a plain old maul. This may have an advantage over that, but it seems like trying to improve on a situation that's already good enough.
As the GP says, if you're splitting by hand, you're already choosing to do a job by hand that really can be efficiently outsourced to a machine. (And given the high price of this axe, one that's not necessarily all that much more expensive.) The thwack of splitting can be quite cheerful; you feel like you've accomplished something.
I'd like to see it applied to some of the crap I've split in my time, where it takes a dozen carefully-placed whacks to get it to go (and sometimes, not even then). That's not fun.