First, having negative preconceptions doesn't make you a racist, it makes you a human being. Being a racist involves consciously fueling those negative models, or at least accepting them as valid, which is not what you claim to be doing (although maybe you do?). So no, you're not a racist.
Second, that "America has a long history of segregation and punishing 'different' people" seems to be the very reason *why* we have hate crime laws, not because they are just (as in justice) laws. But we can't solve discrimination with more discrimination because now, not only do the people who are (irrationally) hated still exist, but they're now perceived to have the upper hand, which only adds fuel to the flame of hate.
And the concept is flawed. I can think of hundreds of crimes that "terrorize" a far larger group of people than a specific subset of those same people (though I would argue that being terrorized is something you allow to happen, and cannot happen without your consent), and yet they don't have bias protections. Serial killers. Serial rapists. Home invasion, FFS. These things affect everyone equally, and yet we don't have special laws that create a special class of crime based on motive, nor should we.
Sorry, but that argument is bullshit. If a random guy walking down the street is beat up for his shoes, or because he was on someone else's "turf," that strikes just as much fear in the community. And let's stop using terrorism as a synonym for crime please.
You're confusing intent, mens rea, with motive, and motive has *never* been an aspect of consideration beyond establishing or removing reasonable doubt. It doesn't matter what your motive is for robbing a bank, whether you wanted to feed your starving family or maliciously deprive the bank and its customers of money for personal gain, only your intent to rob it. It doesn't matter whether you killed your husband because he was cheating or because he takes you for granted. Likewise, it shouldn't matter what Ravi's motive was -- he hated gays, or he wanted to seem cool, or whatever -- only his intent, which was to deliberately humiliate and intimidate his roommate.
The most heinous criminal justice code of them all is part of "all that".
I was referring to Ghandi.. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." I figured it was redundant to be verbose given the context of disagreeing with the original statement.
What part of "queer-bashing earns you a lifetime of payback" do people like Ravi not understand?
Well, I don't think I'm like Ravi, and I don't feel sorry for him either, but I don't understand any of the above. An eye for an eye and all that.
Further, I think it's fine to have criminal statues for bullying or intimidation, but adding "bias" to it is bullshit. All intimidation is biased, and the fact that a victim is a nerd or a jock or straight or gay or black or hispanic should have no bearing on the punishment. That's what equality means.
That's why another part of the contract undoubtedly says that you may cancel at any time if you disagree with the changes. As for your claim of coercion based on practical issues of limited alternate providers, courts have consistently found that limited (or inferior) choices are not the same as having no choice. This was one of the grounds for dismissing suits against no-fly lists -- you can just take a train!
Right, the entire first half of the comments, devoted entirely to the best way to continue pirating without getting noticed, simply reeks of principled stands.
Fact is, people generally *don't* take principled stands. I wish they did, but as a whole, they just don't, and the examples are everywhere. For every one guy who resigns from Goldman Sachs on principle (after over a decade of making huge profits of course), there are thousands upon thousands who continue to bill, bilk, and swindle for personal gain. People generally act out of self-interest with an emphasis on instant gratification, and rationalize accordingly.
Milli- is just a prefix. Technically millikelvin (mK) and even kilokelvin (kK), are valid units and symbols, although they're not commonly used, especially since temperature is rarely measured to the resolution of 10^-3. And kelvin is indeed part of the metric system along with Celsius.
Whoever dreamed this up didn't think it through very well. Illegally copied money is devalued specifically by law, not because it's inherently less valuable. The fact that counterfeiters exist is clear evidence that copied money *does* have value, and in fact all legal currency is copied anyway by the mints who print it. It's hard to think of a *worse* way to make an argument that copied material is not just as valuable as the original.
No, it's not the fact that dogs hit on the vehicle, but that the vehicle was stopped in the first place. The GP said probable cause, but that's the wrong label -- the justification for stopping someone is called "reasonable suspicion." The Supreme Court even admitted that checkpoints were unconstitutional when they narrowly found that their unconstitutionality was outweighed by the interest of public safety. I believe this ruling was wrong, and that responsible citizens should be pushing for laws that clearly define random checkpoints as illegal fishing expeditions (as has been done in several states), but that's how things stand right now at the federal level.
The second problem is that CBP is conducting the checkpoints, and there's a very real question as to whether they're overstepping their authority by conducting checkpoints well inside the border. From CBP's own website: "A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officerâ(TM)s border search authority is derived from federal statutes and regulations, including 19 C.F.R. 162.6, which states that, 'All persons, baggage and merchandise arriving in the Customs territory of the United States from places outside thereof are liable to inspection by a CBP officer.'" http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/admissibility/authority_to_search.xml By definition, something that is outside of the customs area is already inside the U.S., not "arriving in the U.S." It's admittedly a grey area, because CBP clearly needs the authority to pursue people who cross illegally, but they shouldn't be infringing on the rights of citizens in the process.
How about we don't send people to jail unless we as a society are willing to pay for a full and competent defense. If we're not willing to pay that much to send someone to jail, then it's not really that important that they be in jail in the first place.
That's a very salient point. It's also worth noting that just going to jail for a few weeks or months is an enormous punishment for most people, with cascading effects that can very quickly and easily lead to loss of all net worth and even homelessness. You can't work if you're in jail, which for many people means that can't pay their rent or mortgage, and eviction or foreclosure can and does result in the loss of any and all personal property contained in the dwelling. Meanwhile bank accounts are being emptied to fund a defense.
And it's also worth noting that the cost of keeping people imprisoned can very easily exceed the cost of a trial, so keeping innocent people out of jail can be not just good social and ethical policy, but good economic policy as well.
The problem is in removing the conflict of interest from a state-provided defense. In many existing state systems, as in the federal system, public defender is often an office viewed as a stepping stone to DA, and eventually to elected office, and you don't want to run for office with a record of "setting criminals free." I mean you can try to reframe that as providing a constitutional right to defense, but people frequently don't value that line of thought unless and until their own ass is on the line.
I think what we should be doing is encouraging young law students who are passionate about defense to go into *prosecution*. You can't change the system from the outside, and criminal defense attorneys are either on the outside, or else sleeping with the enemy, neither of which are conducive to affecting change.
In the case of someone removing the battery from my phone, regardless of where they placed it afterward, I would punch them right in the mouth.
In the case of someone removing the battery from and subsequently reassembling my iPhone, I would punch them right in the mouth and then compliment them on their technical geek fu.
A prosecutor can threaten to charge you with a crime that carries a life sentence but it takes a judge and a jury to impose it. The only reason that to take his threat seriously is because you predict that it's likely that he will prevail at trial.
What portion of innocent people are incarcerated? 100% if you listen to people behind bars; something significantly less than that if you listen to the gov. We have no way to measure this quantity accurately, therefore, even in the best of cases, you have a choice between a known but relatively small sentence with 100% probability and an unknown but potentially much worse sentence with unknown probability. Only someone who's bad at math, someone with very, very strong evidence of his innocence, or someone with nothing to lose would choose the latter. If you're depending on a jury to believe your story over "theirs", you're doing it wrong, especially if the testimony for the prosecution is more credible than for your defense, and unless you're very well off or very lucky, it will be.
"They" will also say that without making shoplifting into a big deal, it would be a much bigger problem. I don't know if "they" are right or not, but if it's known that there's no consequence, it's not unreasonable to think that there might be an uptick in shoplifting. As for policing employees, that's starting to get a lot more attention these days as employees are getting more brazen. I do have a great deal of sympathy for people who can't afford to buy the very products they're selling on the wage they earn, but some people wrongly believe that entitles them to make up for it with an employee discount of the five finger variety. I will say that as retailers step up policies against employee pilfering, I would expect to see a decline in both the quality and quantity of people willing to work those jobs. You could argue that someone who takes home an iPod isn't the kind of employee you want working for you anyway, but people's sense of morality isn't always that cut and dry, and it may be cheaper to turn a blind eye in some cases. The same can't be said of shoplifting, since if a customer isn't paying for the merchandise, he's definitely not contributing to your success in any way.
To be fair, selective pressures will cause genetic modifications (or more accurately, the proliferation of the most appropriately adapted modifications) on their own, with or without our assistance. The difference is in whether we want to do it intelligently, or randomly. Random mutations can work, especially if we don't particularly care who, or indeed what, ultimately dominates, but intelligent genetic engineering, like most other decisions that we don't leave to chance, is probably the better answer.
As for the "do no harm" platitude, surgery is harmful in itself. Some accidentally does no medical good (the patient dies), and some intentionally does no medical good (as with most cosmetic surgery). So that's a bit simplistic. It's all about weighing the potentials for harm against the potential for good.
That said, if we're at the point where we can engineer the characteristics described in TFS, let's go ahead and work on some more pressing problems with the human genome first.
Slashdot Mirror
First, having negative preconceptions doesn't make you a racist, it makes you a human being. Being a racist involves consciously fueling those negative models, or at least accepting them as valid, which is not what you claim to be doing (although maybe you do?). So no, you're not a racist.
Second, that "America has a long history of segregation and punishing 'different' people" seems to be the very reason *why* we have hate crime laws, not because they are just (as in justice) laws. But we can't solve discrimination with more discrimination because now, not only do the people who are (irrationally) hated still exist, but they're now perceived to have the upper hand, which only adds fuel to the flame of hate.
And the concept is flawed. I can think of hundreds of crimes that "terrorize" a far larger group of people than a specific subset of those same people (though I would argue that being terrorized is something you allow to happen, and cannot happen without your consent), and yet they don't have bias protections. Serial killers. Serial rapists. Home invasion, FFS. These things affect everyone equally, and yet we don't have special laws that create a special class of crime based on motive, nor should we.
Again, I thought the context made it apparent. My deepest apologies for being ambiguous. I will now "go, and..."
Sorry, but that argument is bullshit. If a random guy walking down the street is beat up for his shoes, or because he was on someone else's "turf," that strikes just as much fear in the community. And let's stop using terrorism as a synonym for crime please.
You're confusing intent, mens rea, with motive, and motive has *never* been an aspect of consideration beyond establishing or removing reasonable doubt. It doesn't matter what your motive is for robbing a bank, whether you wanted to feed your starving family or maliciously deprive the bank and its customers of money for personal gain, only your intent to rob it. It doesn't matter whether you killed your husband because he was cheating or because he takes you for granted. Likewise, it shouldn't matter what Ravi's motive was -- he hated gays, or he wanted to seem cool, or whatever -- only his intent, which was to deliberately humiliate and intimidate his roommate.
The most heinous criminal justice code of them all is part of "all that".
I was referring to Ghandi.. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." I figured it was redundant to be verbose given the context of disagreeing with the original statement.
What part of "queer-bashing earns you a lifetime of payback" do people like Ravi not understand?
Well, I don't think I'm like Ravi, and I don't feel sorry for him either, but I don't understand any of the above. An eye for an eye and all that.
Further, I think it's fine to have criminal statues for bullying or intimidation, but adding "bias" to it is bullshit. All intimidation is biased, and the fact that a victim is a nerd or a jock or straight or gay or black or hispanic should have no bearing on the punishment. That's what equality means.
That's why another part of the contract undoubtedly says that you may cancel at any time if you disagree with the changes. As for your claim of coercion based on practical issues of limited alternate providers, courts have consistently found that limited (or inferior) choices are not the same as having no choice. This was one of the grounds for dismissing suits against no-fly lists -- you can just take a train!
Right, the entire first half of the comments, devoted entirely to the best way to continue pirating without getting noticed, simply reeks of principled stands.
Fact is, people generally *don't* take principled stands. I wish they did, but as a whole, they just don't, and the examples are everywhere. For every one guy who resigns from Goldman Sachs on principle (after over a decade of making huge profits of course), there are thousands upon thousands who continue to bill, bilk, and swindle for personal gain. People generally act out of self-interest with an emphasis on instant gratification, and rationalize accordingly.
Milli- is just a prefix. Technically millikelvin (mK) and even kilokelvin (kK), are valid units and symbols, although they're not commonly used, especially since temperature is rarely measured to the resolution of 10^-3. And kelvin is indeed part of the metric system along with Celsius.
Knowing whether a given storm system is going to drop rain or sleep can be a life-or-death bit of information.
Indeed. Nothing more dangerous than getting caught in a sleep storm when behind the wheel.
You might as well try to stop nature itself.
I believe "stopping nature" is one of the GOP's planks.
I guess you missed the part where he said he drinks coffee.
Caffeine is bitter on its own, and also reacts with other ingredients/chemicals to produce other flavors, so no, it probably won't taste the same.
My 'fancy' coffee roasting gear consists of a dutch oven on a gas grill.
If this is a common practice, it explains a lot about the aroma of coffee.
Whoever dreamed this up didn't think it through very well. Illegally copied money is devalued specifically by law, not because it's inherently less valuable. The fact that counterfeiters exist is clear evidence that copied money *does* have value, and in fact all legal currency is copied anyway by the mints who print it. It's hard to think of a *worse* way to make an argument that copied material is not just as valuable as the original.
No, it's not the fact that dogs hit on the vehicle, but that the vehicle was stopped in the first place. The GP said probable cause, but that's the wrong label -- the justification for stopping someone is called "reasonable suspicion." The Supreme Court even admitted that checkpoints were unconstitutional when they narrowly found that their unconstitutionality was outweighed by the interest of public safety. I believe this ruling was wrong, and that responsible citizens should be pushing for laws that clearly define random checkpoints as illegal fishing expeditions (as has been done in several states), but that's how things stand right now at the federal level.
The second problem is that CBP is conducting the checkpoints, and there's a very real question as to whether they're overstepping their authority by conducting checkpoints well inside the border. From CBP's own website: "A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officerâ(TM)s border search authority is derived from federal statutes and regulations, including 19 C.F.R. 162.6, which states that, 'All persons, baggage and merchandise arriving in the Customs territory of the United States from places outside thereof are liable to inspection by a CBP officer.'" http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/admissibility/authority_to_search.xml By definition, something that is outside of the customs area is already inside the U.S., not "arriving in the U.S." It's admittedly a grey area, because CBP clearly needs the authority to pursue people who cross illegally, but they shouldn't be infringing on the rights of citizens in the process.
How about we don't send people to jail unless we as a society are willing to pay for a full and competent defense. If we're not willing to pay that much to send someone to jail, then it's not really that important that they be in jail in the first place.
That's a very salient point. It's also worth noting that just going to jail for a few weeks or months is an enormous punishment for most people, with cascading effects that can very quickly and easily lead to loss of all net worth and even homelessness. You can't work if you're in jail, which for many people means that can't pay their rent or mortgage, and eviction or foreclosure can and does result in the loss of any and all personal property contained in the dwelling. Meanwhile bank accounts are being emptied to fund a defense.
And it's also worth noting that the cost of keeping people imprisoned can very easily exceed the cost of a trial, so keeping innocent people out of jail can be not just good social and ethical policy, but good economic policy as well.
The problem is in removing the conflict of interest from a state-provided defense. In many existing state systems, as in the federal system, public defender is often an office viewed as a stepping stone to DA, and eventually to elected office, and you don't want to run for office with a record of "setting criminals free." I mean you can try to reframe that as providing a constitutional right to defense, but people frequently don't value that line of thought unless and until their own ass is on the line.
I think what we should be doing is encouraging young law students who are passionate about defense to go into *prosecution*. You can't change the system from the outside, and criminal defense attorneys are either on the outside, or else sleeping with the enemy, neither of which are conducive to affecting change.
For reference, China is only slightly below the U.S. in both percentage and raw number
Is that supposed to be comforting *at all*?
"Hey, we're only slightly worse than China's publicized numbers... our prison populations might only rank second or third... in the entire. world.."
In the case of someone removing the battery from my phone, regardless of where they placed it afterward, I would punch them right in the mouth.
In the case of someone removing the battery from and subsequently reassembling my iPhone, I would punch them right in the mouth and then compliment them on their technical geek fu.
A prosecutor can threaten to charge you with a crime that carries a life sentence but it takes a judge and a jury to impose it. The only reason that to take his threat seriously is because you predict that it's likely that he will prevail at trial.
What portion of innocent people are incarcerated? 100% if you listen to people behind bars; something significantly less than that if you listen to the gov. We have no way to measure this quantity accurately, therefore, even in the best of cases, you have a choice between a known but relatively small sentence with 100% probability and an unknown but potentially much worse sentence with unknown probability. Only someone who's bad at math, someone with very, very strong evidence of his innocence, or someone with nothing to lose would choose the latter. If you're depending on a jury to believe your story over "theirs", you're doing it wrong, especially if the testimony for the prosecution is more credible than for your defense, and unless you're very well off or very lucky, it will be.
"They" will also say that without making shoplifting into a big deal, it would be a much bigger problem. I don't know if "they" are right or not, but if it's known that there's no consequence, it's not unreasonable to think that there might be an uptick in shoplifting. As for policing employees, that's starting to get a lot more attention these days as employees are getting more brazen. I do have a great deal of sympathy for people who can't afford to buy the very products they're selling on the wage they earn, but some people wrongly believe that entitles them to make up for it with an employee discount of the five finger variety. I will say that as retailers step up policies against employee pilfering, I would expect to see a decline in both the quality and quantity of people willing to work those jobs. You could argue that someone who takes home an iPod isn't the kind of employee you want working for you anyway, but people's sense of morality isn't always that cut and dry, and it may be cheaper to turn a blind eye in some cases. The same can't be said of shoplifting, since if a customer isn't paying for the merchandise, he's definitely not contributing to your success in any way.
To be fair, selective pressures will cause genetic modifications (or more accurately, the proliferation of the most appropriately adapted modifications) on their own, with or without our assistance. The difference is in whether we want to do it intelligently, or randomly. Random mutations can work, especially if we don't particularly care who, or indeed what, ultimately dominates, but intelligent genetic engineering, like most other decisions that we don't leave to chance, is probably the better answer.
As for the "do no harm" platitude, surgery is harmful in itself. Some accidentally does no medical good (the patient dies), and some intentionally does no medical good (as with most cosmetic surgery). So that's a bit simplistic. It's all about weighing the potentials for harm against the potential for good.
That said, if we're at the point where we can engineer the characteristics described in TFS, let's go ahead and work on some more pressing problems with the human genome first.
I assumed this was an early article about April 25th (366/pi).
You could say it's two Pis and then sum.