If you're on about immediate results which user can see, nothing beats QBASIC (still included with every WinXP).
Type - F5 - immediate execution and -should that not be fast enough for you- there's an "immediate" window below that's even faster
I loved that tool. Very limiting in what it can do, but talk about immediate -and enjoyable- results. It's even faster than turbo pascal and turbo C, both of which are still very, very fast in starting programs. And all of these make one want to ask the ancient egyptians for some hints to survive a single java or gcc compile.
And while, yes, qbasic is slow, it's certainly fast and capable enough to get a full-blown software rendering 3d engine operational in on a 286. Arguing about execution speed of qbasic on anything resemblind a recent machine is ridiculous.
Rigorous programming is as much of a trap as sloppy programming. In my experience programming projects often fail entirely due to too stringent, too rigorous programming methodology. Totally neglecting the "let's get it working" angle gets you only failure.
And yes sloppy code causes disasters. But at least they cause disasters only after actually running the code. Rigorous programming causes disasters before the first cpu has seen the first bit of your program.
Besides is there any argument against sloppy programming except the sort of academic frustration people have with badly spelled letters, not even reading the contents ?
Besides, extremely sloppy programming is how all big successes started, linux, windows, hell even unix started out more than just a little sloppy. And the very popular ruby language... talk about sloppy. Yes it's very nice for certain kinds of programming, but everyone can see it's the next perl.
Btw, it must be painful for you but that grid is being used to transport nuclear power. From states that have nothing against nuclear plants to states that have outlawed them (e.g. Netherlands).
The fact that you need hundreds of billions of new infrastructure to give wind even a simple fighting chance to replace a little bit of the grid baseload capacity.
Wind drops from 100% to 0% in 2 minutes with less than 30 seconds warning, and this happens every 2 hours or so on bad days. It certainly happens daily. That's a fact.
That means that unless you wish to have a grid with constant catastrophic failures, every 2 hours on bad days, daily on good days, you need to have standby capacity for wind running. That means that in order to use wind you have to have the same amount of power from a coal, oil, gas or nuclear station actively generating (and using fuel) in order to deliver wind power reliably.
And needless to say, not even the most devoted totally-bought-into-every-craze-since-elvis person will buy wind power that's not reliable.
What they're trying to do to solve this is to have a massive grid across vast distances, so wind doesn't fail on all generators simultaneously. But grids have power loss (10% per 100 km power loss is not that bad a number), and wind fails almost simultaneously over distances sometimes as large as 500 km (though generally we're talking 200km). Every kilometer extra poses extra problems for redirecting power in time, as there's so very little warning. And this is ignoring the massive cost this infrastructure would have. We're talking 2 months of Obama pocket change (500 billion dollars) for a basic grid that would interconnect 3 states on every coast. For a full deployment we're talking a year of Obama pocket change. No serious politician is even suggesting we can pay such amounts.
Also, that power grid must be able, due to the transmission losses, to deliver more power than the failing generator. It must deliver, at 500 km (a reasonable distance), 70% more power than any number of generator it needs to potentially replace.
That means that, even if we somehow get this grid operational, using wind power means we must waste, in the power plant, about 70% of the power used (at least), more (> 200%) if you wish for coast-to-coast redundancy.
In case you're wondering, the comparable number for "conventional" (or nuclear) power is 2% overcapacity.
Why aren't power companies investing in wind power ? Because it doesn't work*. We don't have the technology to reasonably implement this power source. Sorry Al Gore.
Unless, of course, you're willing to settle for constant blackouts in trade for using wind power. Given how much Al Gore's mansion is using, I somehow doubt he'd be a taker.
* there's also this reason : liberals are mad about renewable power. They don't take reality into account. So they're biding their time, knowing full well liberals will give them the trillions of dollars they need to give wind or solar a fighting chance. Obviously then they will be able to take a tiny percentage of profit from it. And, obviously, even 0.1% of 1 trillion dollars is more money than most of us will ever see in our lives.
And how much of that 9% is actually spent on patients and docters, and how much on administration, rule-checking and general bureaucracy ?
Is it 50/50 ? Do tell.
Furthermore, I would contend that this is not the deal your government promised the baby boomers if they created the NHS. It is not that deal *at all*.
Do you think government will still respect this, much more limited, deal when you finally need it ? I somehow doubt it.
The NHS will prioritize treatment, so if you need it tomorrow you most likely will have it tomorrow, if it is not so urgent, yeah, it will take a while.
That is, of course, the propaganda statement. What will, in reality happen is that the NHS will put a price on your survival, and deduct the cost of the potential outcomes. If any of those numbers go below 0, you... well... you are left without treatment.
It sorts patients based on what amounts to least cost for the government, not based on medical necessity. And yes, after that it will make manual adjustments on the most idiotic decisions made by this algorithm (thank God for those adjustments).
The NHS is the best possible example illustrating the blatant falsehood that with the government in charge profit motive will disappear from medicine. In fact it will become worse : you are forced to buy from a monopolist AND said monopolist has a profit motive (spending as little as possible on you for the maximum benefit (in this case, tax-wise)).
So with the govt in charge you have all the disadvantages of government, like easy fraud, massive bureaucracy, practical unaccountability of the "do we treat this guy" decision makers, and the constant addition of new, ever more idiotic rules due to changing guard in the parliament. And then you combine these disadvantages with the disadvantages that someone who wishes to spend as little as possible on your life, the so-called "profit motive".
No but serving 1000 people with 1 machine takes 1000*$scan_time
Serving 1000 people with 2 machines (and crew) takes 2000*$scan_time.
The problem being of course, that for a number of diseases a scan is adviced, because it can detect complications or alter the diagnosis. But if you have to wait 8 months for a scan, the patient will be long dead in the case of complications.
In order to guarantee prompt service delivery in emergency you'll need to have extra capacity, that will sit unused some of the time.
E.g. in order to be ready you'll have to have full-on flu research and treatment facilities going on 24/7/365 despite the chances of getting new infectees during e.g. early summer is tiny.
So which handicaps and genetic diseases are death sentences under this system ? Death sentences in the sense that the government will do something between denying you critical care and outright kill you.
It might suck to see macroeconomics in these terms. Recessions are ultimately caused by poor capital allocation or risk management. Industries recede to sustainable levels -- because the capital allocation before then was unsustainable (or was sustainable but has become unsustainable through circumstance). This isn't "laziness", but poor planning. The "victims" of poor planning were like hogs at a trough before their unnecessary jobs were eliminated.
Yes but you leave out something very important : WHY is capital poorly allocated ? WHY is risk management screwed up ? After all, especially in agricultural matters, we've got close to 5000 years experience with it. Surely we'd have found a way to deal with the risk and surely we know what capital to allocate ?
Yet we regularly hear about famines, even huge ones. What is going on ?
The simple truth is that the world changes. It changes the conditions of agriculture : a new plant disease, ground erosion, water changes. Despite the constant barrage of propaganda to the contrary, land does not have constant productivity if we were to just do things the natural way. In fact, that would cause much more massive fluctuations in the food supply. Fluctuations that would kill millions.
The problem with allocating resources, wether capital, or redundancy (to avoid risk), is that finding a good resource allocation involves predicting a huge number of variables into the future. Nobody knows the future, and nobody knows the consequences of a particular allocation of finite resources. Especially the downsides tend to come as a surprise. And when it comes to resource allocation, small mistakes cost dearly, mistakes cause recessions and big mistakes cause famines, civil war, and worse.
Recessions are caused by wrong capital allocations or risk management issues, yes, absolutely true. But one wrong prediction about the future pretty much guarantees wrong capital allocation and mistakes in risk management. In other words, every failed prediction brings us closer to recession. Of course that's for a capitalist system, where many actors have variances in how risk is spread. If we had a single entity doing that, whether said entity is the government, or monsanto, we'd be one wrong prediction from close to zero available food.
And, pray tell, is the waiting time for a "publicly funded" scan ?
And what is the waiting time for a "private" scan ?
What if you don't have 8 months time ? How many deaths could have been prevented by allowing the cost of NHS scans to increase to 1200 pounds ? Thousand ? Ten thousand ? A million ? Nobody knows, but it certainly is a positive number.
Do you really have illusions that people "outside of the west" do not want to extend life at all costs ?
You should better distinguish between not having the means to do something and not wanting to do something. If it's a dictator, every few months there's a newspaper article about some "non-west" dictator paying some "western" docter millions for the off chance of extending his life even a few years, despite him having passed the average life expectancy of the country he rules by a factor of 3 or so.
Lots of people don't have 5 jacuzzi's with 70 inch oled tv screens in their house. This is, at least in my case, not for lack of want.
What do you consider "medical benefit", because if you interpret the Hippocratic oath version of "medical benefit", even a second's life extension would count as medical benefit.
And according to that same Hippocratic oath, both euthanasia and abortion fall in the category of criminal, and should exclude anyone performing these from any and all forms of medical profession.
As for your other claims:
Many people fear being locked into a dysfunctional shell of a body.
And others would prefer being alive, even if only to see the world move around them, even if it meant pain.
Many people have faith that there are seemingly miraculous recoveries from even the worst conditions.
As any docter with a few years under his belt will tell you : that's absolutely true. People come back from the most dreadful diseases, seemingly without reason at all. The other side of the coin is also a fact, some people come in with mild coughing, then drop dead 10 minutes after the docter declares them hypochondric and "prescribes" cough syrup.
Which is, of course, why just about any disease's survivability is a bell curve : you can be the one at the top, that still lives 100 years after being diagnosed. Of course, the chances of this depend on the disease.
It really depends. If the company does their homework and goes for long term planning, insurance is, well, insurance. This means, obviously, savings, savings, savings. Some insurances do this.
If the company spent or gave dividend with what should have been future investments, often done, then insurance becomes a pyramid scheme. If the company only even attempts to cover the cost of current expenses, not saving for the future, that company is a pyramid scheme.
And for the political war, imho : what Obama is proposing falls squarely in the second category : it's forcing everyone to underscribe a singular option that MAY cover today's needs. Let's say it does cover actually cover the needs of today's patients, and that the CBO is wrong. Nothing is saved for tomorrow's needs, for when the patient becomes old. Instead it is assumed that when patients grow old, enough new productive citizens (ie. current children) will be paying enough taxes to make up for it, or taxes can be raised to cover the cost. Obviously this is not true, unless the pool of new citizens is necessarily always bigger than before. So it seems to me the system Obama proposes is one baby boom (with dropoff afterwards) removed from collapse.
Question, but as the internet is surely not meant to violate copyrights (heh...), do you have permission from the author of said document to distribute it ? And since you're posting a link, do you have permission to help someone (even an unknown) distribute it ?
... which is exactly why communism (like Venezuela's government) is so very very oppressive
As can be seen in Venezuela, especially doing something useful is against the public intrest. You see, it immediately leads to social injustice. If you repair your roof, see, that means you get a better roof than your neighbor who also has a broken roof. And that's just UNfair. Won't somebody think of the children ?
Of course in practice lots of children die from exposure in Venezuela. Or just plain from getting murdered. But hey at least they're socially just lives (and presumably socially just deaths. In case of a girl, probably after getting raped in a socially just way)
Perhaps so, but reasons and what-ifs aside, I wonder how they plan to block the vast amount of browser games that are certainly violent? How do you stop the internets?
Perhaps you should ask the Iranians (incidentially, Hugo is doing exactly that). It boils down to simply : 1) use physical threats, apparently Iranian government catches you, they rape you if you're female (to make sure you don't get into heaven. Apparently in islam raped women go to hell), then have a local mob kill you (for fun), painfully. Then they threaten your family with the same if they don't come collect your body 2) firewall that allows govt to inspect any traffic they want and logs blocks, you appear to much (or even once) on the blocklist then "goto step 1"
The concept of "search warrants" for ANY country is a rather dubious legal claim when the authorities have so many excuses to disregard civil liberties.
What you neglect to say is that of course the same goes for any motivated and funded person/organisation. Hell even a cult could do this (didn't scientology pull something similar a few years back ?)
The point is that if the government does this, and they fail to provide a legal explanation of how they acquired said evidence, that you go free (in western legal systems). No matter how direct the evidence against you that was acquired serrupticiously.
In a hypothetical case if a policeman sees you standing over a dead body with a bloody knife in your hands screaming "I'm glad I killed the bastard", then breaks down the window and arrests you. If it turns out the policeman had no legal reason to be there, they will not only have to let you go free, but they will have to pay for the broken window, and pay for a new shirt that was damaged by the glass.
So the police CAN do this, obviously. But it's futile and dangerous for them. If you commit a crime now, and they base their case against you on DNA evidence, you're automatically innocent.
Great, and that might be a good excuse for killing yourself, however suicide is not what these environuts are contemplating, it's genocide that's being contemplated :
Slashdot Mirror
If you're on about immediate results which user can see, nothing beats QBASIC (still included with every WinXP).
Type - F5 - immediate execution
and -should that not be fast enough for you- there's an "immediate" window below that's even faster
I loved that tool. Very limiting in what it can do, but talk about immediate -and enjoyable- results. It's even faster than turbo pascal and turbo C, both of which are still very, very fast in starting programs. And all of these make one want to ask the ancient egyptians for some hints to survive a single java or gcc compile.
And while, yes, qbasic is slow, it's certainly fast and capable enough to get a full-blown software rendering 3d engine operational in on a 286. Arguing about execution speed of qbasic on anything resemblind a recent machine is ridiculous.
Rigorous programming is as much of a trap as sloppy programming. In my experience programming projects often fail entirely due to too stringent, too rigorous programming methodology. Totally neglecting the "let's get it working" angle gets you only failure.
And yes sloppy code causes disasters. But at least they cause disasters only after actually running the code. Rigorous programming causes disasters before the first cpu has seen the first bit of your program.
Besides is there any argument against sloppy programming except the sort of academic frustration people have with badly spelled letters, not even reading the contents ?
Besides, extremely sloppy programming is how all big successes started, linux, windows, hell even unix started out more than just a little sloppy. And the very popular ruby language ... talk about sloppy. Yes it's very nice for certain kinds of programming, but everyone can see it's the next perl.
No ? Seems they can. Of course, this doesn't happen often, but I doubt he's truly the only one.
Another small detail : Parliament has zero power.
All power lies with the comission. The appointed (which means unelected in practice) comission.
So what is parliament going to do ? Pretty much the same as any other lowly slave (excuse me "citizen") : make a bit of a stink, then give up.
Both links should get a simple reply :
vaporware
Btw, it must be painful for you but that grid is being used to transport nuclear power. From states that have nothing against nuclear plants to states that have outlawed them (e.g. Netherlands).
The fact that you need hundreds of billions of new infrastructure to give wind even a simple fighting chance to replace a little bit of the grid baseload capacity.
Wind drops from 100% to 0% in 2 minutes with less than 30 seconds warning, and this happens every 2 hours or so on bad days. It certainly happens daily. That's a fact.
That means that unless you wish to have a grid with constant catastrophic failures, every 2 hours on bad days, daily on good days, you need to have standby capacity for wind running. That means that in order to use wind you have to have the same amount of power from a coal, oil, gas or nuclear station actively generating (and using fuel) in order to deliver wind power reliably.
And needless to say, not even the most devoted totally-bought-into-every-craze-since-elvis person will buy wind power that's not reliable.
What they're trying to do to solve this is to have a massive grid across vast distances, so wind doesn't fail on all generators simultaneously. But grids have power loss (10% per 100 km power loss is not that bad a number), and wind fails almost simultaneously over distances sometimes as large as 500 km (though generally we're talking 200km). Every kilometer extra poses extra problems for redirecting power in time, as there's so very little warning. And this is ignoring the massive cost this infrastructure would have. We're talking 2 months of Obama pocket change (500 billion dollars) for a basic grid that would interconnect 3 states on every coast. For a full deployment we're talking a year of Obama pocket change. No serious politician is even suggesting we can pay such amounts.
Also, that power grid must be able, due to the transmission losses, to deliver more power than the failing generator. It must deliver, at 500 km (a reasonable distance), 70% more power than any number of generator it needs to potentially replace.
That means that, even if we somehow get this grid operational, using wind power means we must waste, in the power plant, about 70% of the power used (at least), more (> 200%) if you wish for coast-to-coast redundancy.
In case you're wondering, the comparable number for "conventional" (or nuclear) power is 2% overcapacity.
Why aren't power companies investing in wind power ? Because it doesn't work*. We don't have the technology to reasonably implement this power source. Sorry Al Gore.
Unless, of course, you're willing to settle for constant blackouts in trade for using wind power. Given how much Al Gore's mansion is using, I somehow doubt he'd be a taker.
* there's also this reason : liberals are mad about renewable power. They don't take reality into account. So they're biding their time, knowing full well liberals will give them the trillions of dollars they need to give wind or solar a fighting chance. Obviously then they will be able to take a tiny percentage of profit from it. And, obviously, even 0.1% of 1 trillion dollars is more money than most of us will ever see in our lives.
And how much of that 9% is actually spent on patients and docters, and how much on administration, rule-checking and general bureaucracy ?
Is it 50/50 ? Do tell.
Furthermore, I would contend that this is not the deal your government promised the baby boomers if they created the NHS. It is not that deal *at all*.
Do you think government will still respect this, much more limited, deal when you finally need it ? I somehow doubt it.
The NHS will prioritize treatment, so if you need it tomorrow you most likely will have it tomorrow, if it is not so urgent, yeah, it will take a while.
That is, of course, the propaganda statement. What will, in reality happen is that the NHS will put a price on your survival, and deduct the cost of the potential outcomes. If any of those numbers go below 0, you ... well ... you are left without treatment.
It sorts patients based on what amounts to least cost for the government, not based on medical necessity. And yes, after that it will make manual adjustments on the most idiotic decisions made by this algorithm (thank God for those adjustments).
The NHS is the best possible example illustrating the blatant falsehood that with the government in charge profit motive will disappear from medicine. In fact it will become worse : you are forced to buy from a monopolist AND said monopolist has a profit motive (spending as little as possible on you for the maximum benefit (in this case, tax-wise)).
So with the govt in charge you have all the disadvantages of government, like easy fraud, massive bureaucracy, practical unaccountability of the "do we treat this guy" decision makers, and the constant addition of new, ever more idiotic rules due to changing guard in the parliament. And then you combine these disadvantages with the disadvantages that someone who wishes to spend as little as possible on your life, the so-called "profit motive".
No but serving 1000 people with 1 machine takes 1000*$scan_time
Serving 1000 people with 2 machines (and crew) takes 2000*$scan_time.
The problem being of course, that for a number of diseases a scan is adviced, because it can detect complications or alter the diagnosis. But if you have to wait 8 months for a scan, the patient will be long dead in the case of complications.
In order to guarantee prompt service delivery in emergency you'll need to have extra capacity, that will sit unused some of the time.
E.g. in order to be ready you'll have to have full-on flu research and treatment facilities going on 24/7/365 despite the chances of getting new infectees during e.g. early summer is tiny.
Don't worry about that, every European government would have let that guy die in the first year of treatment.
You get what you pay for. Except you pay more, and get less. Furthermore, you have zero choice in the matter.
So which handicaps and genetic diseases are death sentences under this system ? Death sentences in the sense that the government will do something between denying you critical care and outright kill you.
It might suck to see macroeconomics in these terms. Recessions are ultimately caused by poor capital allocation or risk management. Industries recede to sustainable levels -- because the capital allocation before then was unsustainable (or was sustainable but has become unsustainable through circumstance). This isn't "laziness", but poor planning. The "victims" of poor planning were like hogs at a trough before their unnecessary jobs were eliminated.
Yes but you leave out something very important : WHY is capital poorly allocated ? WHY is risk management screwed up ? After all, especially in agricultural matters, we've got close to 5000 years experience with it. Surely we'd have found a way to deal with the risk and surely we know what capital to allocate ?
Yet we regularly hear about famines, even huge ones. What is going on ?
The simple truth is that the world changes. It changes the conditions of agriculture : a new plant disease, ground erosion, water changes. Despite the constant barrage of propaganda to the contrary, land does not have constant productivity if we were to just do things the natural way. In fact, that would cause much more massive fluctuations in the food supply. Fluctuations that would kill millions.
The problem with allocating resources, wether capital, or redundancy (to avoid risk), is that finding a good resource allocation involves predicting a huge number of variables into the future. Nobody knows the future, and nobody knows the consequences of a particular allocation of finite resources. Especially the downsides tend to come as a surprise. And when it comes to resource allocation, small mistakes cost dearly, mistakes cause recessions and big mistakes cause famines, civil war, and worse.
Recessions are caused by wrong capital allocations or risk management issues, yes, absolutely true. But one wrong prediction about the future pretty much guarantees wrong capital allocation and mistakes in risk management. In other words, every failed prediction brings us closer to recession. Of course that's for a capitalist system, where many actors have variances in how risk is spread. If we had a single entity doing that, whether said entity is the government, or monsanto, we'd be one wrong prediction from close to zero available food.
And, pray tell, is the waiting time for a "publicly funded" scan ?
And what is the waiting time for a "private" scan ?
What if you don't have 8 months time ? How many deaths could have been prevented by allowing the cost of NHS scans to increase to 1200 pounds ? Thousand ? Ten thousand ? A million ? Nobody knows, but it certainly is a positive number.
Do you really have illusions that people "outside of the west" do not want to extend life at all costs ?
You should better distinguish between not having the means to do something and not wanting to do something. If it's a dictator, every few months there's a newspaper article about some "non-west" dictator paying some "western" docter millions for the off chance of extending his life even a few years, despite him having passed the average life expectancy of the country he rules by a factor of 3 or so.
Lots of people don't have 5 jacuzzi's with 70 inch oled tv screens in their house. This is, at least in my case, not for lack of want.
So instead of punishing them, murderers should get a bonus from gaia for "services rendered" and continue on, after an interview on live television ?
What do you consider "medical benefit", because if you interpret the Hippocratic oath version of "medical benefit", even a second's life extension would count as medical benefit.
And according to that same Hippocratic oath, both euthanasia and abortion fall in the category of criminal, and should exclude anyone performing these from any and all forms of medical profession.
As for your other claims :
Many people fear being locked into a dysfunctional shell of a body.
And others would prefer being alive, even if only to see the world move around them, even if it meant pain.
Many people have faith that there are seemingly miraculous recoveries from even the worst conditions.
As any docter with a few years under his belt will tell you : that's absolutely true. People come back from the most dreadful diseases, seemingly without reason at all. The other side of the coin is also a fact, some people come in with mild coughing, then drop dead 10 minutes after the docter declares them hypochondric and "prescribes" cough syrup.
Which is, of course, why just about any disease's survivability is a bell curve : you can be the one at the top, that still lives 100 years after being diagnosed. Of course, the chances of this depend on the disease.
It really depends. If the company does their homework and goes for long term planning, insurance is, well, insurance. This means, obviously, savings, savings, savings. Some insurances do this.
If the company spent or gave dividend with what should have been future investments, often done, then insurance becomes a pyramid scheme. If the company only even attempts to cover the cost of current expenses, not saving for the future, that company is a pyramid scheme.
And for the political war, imho : what Obama is proposing falls squarely in the second category : it's forcing everyone to underscribe a singular option that MAY cover today's needs. Let's say it does cover actually cover the needs of today's patients, and that the CBO is wrong. Nothing is saved for tomorrow's needs, for when the patient becomes old. Instead it is assumed that when patients grow old, enough new productive citizens (ie. current children) will be paying enough taxes to make up for it, or taxes can be raised to cover the cost. Obviously this is not true, unless the pool of new citizens is necessarily always bigger than before. So it seems to me the system Obama proposes is one baby boom (with dropoff afterwards) removed from collapse.
Question, but as the internet is surely not meant to violate copyrights (heh ...), do you have permission from the author of said document to distribute it ? And since you're posting a link, do you have permission to help someone (even an unknown) distribute it ?
In other words, is such a link legal ?
... which is exactly why communism (like Venezuela's government) is so very very oppressive
As can be seen in Venezuela, especially doing something useful is against the public intrest. You see, it immediately leads to social injustice. If you repair your roof, see, that means you get a better roof than your neighbor who also has a broken roof. And that's just UNfair. Won't somebody think of the children ?
Of course in practice lots of children die from exposure in Venezuela. Or just plain from getting murdered. But hey at least they're socially just lives (and presumably socially just deaths. In case of a girl, probably after getting raped in a socially just way)
Perhaps so, but reasons and what-ifs aside, I wonder how they plan to block the vast amount of browser games that are certainly violent? How do you stop the internets?
Perhaps you should ask the Iranians (incidentially, Hugo is doing exactly that). It boils down to simply :
1) use physical threats, apparently Iranian government catches you, they rape you if you're female (to make sure you don't get into heaven. Apparently in islam raped women go to hell), then have a local mob kill you (for fun), painfully. Then they threaten your family with the same if they don't come collect your body
2) firewall that allows govt to inspect any traffic they want and logs blocks, you appear to much (or even once) on the blocklist then "goto step 1"
Isn't "social justice" in government grand ?
The concept of "search warrants" for ANY country is a rather dubious legal claim when the authorities have so many excuses to disregard civil liberties.
What you neglect to say is that of course the same goes for any motivated and funded person/organisation. Hell even a cult could do this (didn't scientology pull something similar a few years back ?)
The point is that if the government does this, and they fail to provide a legal explanation of how they acquired said evidence, that you go free (in western legal systems). No matter how direct the evidence against you that was acquired serrupticiously.
In a hypothetical case if a policeman sees you standing over a dead body with a bloody knife in your hands screaming "I'm glad I killed the bastard", then breaks down the window and arrests you. If it turns out the policeman had no legal reason to be there, they will not only have to let you go free, but they will have to pay for the broken window, and pay for a new shirt that was damaged by the glass.
So the police CAN do this, obviously. But it's futile and dangerous for them. If you commit a crime now, and they base their case against you on DNA evidence, you're automatically innocent.
Well if you finish that bottle entirely in less than 2 hours, there's a substantial chance you won't last the night.
They just want to "push a button that causes the extinction of the human race".
What do you call that ?
My roof has been holding for close to 6 decades now.
Not everything is like the Japanese cars of old you know. Some things are supposed to outlive their warranties.
Great, and that might be a good excuse for killing yourself, however suicide is not what these environuts are contemplating, it's genocide that's being contemplated :
http://www.vhemt.org/
http://www.vhemt.org/philrel.htm#button
Needless to say, they think themselves very necessary :
http://www.vhemt.org/death.htm#killself
All for the good of gaia, of course.