The point of the bank of switches would be to cause reasonable doubt about which of the people did it. Your single switch would leave one person who's action (not inaction) caused a death.
That said, the rest of the comments in this thread are right, the correct way to execute someone in the 21st century is to not execute people in the 21st century.
Yep, came here to say this. The solution is to realise that we're in the 21st century, and we no longer need any of this "eye for an eye" nonsense.
It's more expensive than life imprisonment, it's more likely to have catastrophic consequences if a miscarriage of justice occurs, and it's less of a punishment.
Right, it's not an interesting technical problem to render a scene with lots of interesting lighting effects. No one would ever want to read about that, because game play is more important.
That's a very strange assertion. It's kinda akin to "if there's half a million jobs out there, why are there people who don't have jobs". The answer is trivial - those people don't have the skills necessary to do those jobs. I can tell you for sure, hiring people who (for example) understand performance critical code, code that requires manual memory management, and code that requires you to think about how you're going to affect cache coherency when you do certain things, is incredibly hard. Add a couple of odd constraints like "has an understanding of linear algebra" or "knows how a compiler works", and you're likely to have extreme trouble finding anyone at all for the position.
You realise that when you take a flash photo, the flash should not be pointing at the subject in all but the rarest cases, right?
There's only one type of flash photography that needs the flash to point forwards - that's front filling (where you use the flash to try to even out dim lighting close to the camera, and bright lighting in the distance, and which is typically used for landscape photos)
For pretty much all other cases, instead, you want to bounce the flash off a large surface, to diffuse the light. Otherwise, all you get is photos with a big white specular dot right in the centre.
This is why when you look at a professional flash, you'll note that it tilts in all axes, rather than simply pointing forwards, like the crappy flashes they put on consumer cameras to try and even out their poor ISO response.
The problem with "prison is a punishment" is that it's a really crappy punishment. What society gets out of punishing someone with prison is a person who's become educated in the ways of criminals. That's not a valuable thing. Because of that, use of prison as a punishment should be avoided, and instead, other punishments (like community service) should be used. Then society gets something valuable from the person being punished, they potentially get educated in a task that they weren't before, and is useful to society, and we all win.
As I asserted before, prison should be reserved only for separating people from society when they are dangerous.
Except in one case you'll die within minutes, and in the other you can survive for weeks*.
Attempting to equate the two does nobody any favors.
Okay, so there's a difference in scale. That only means that there's a difference in scale of how much you limit it.
That doesn't mean that the concept is fundamentally flawed.
Note - don't actually try the breathing thing, it'll cause you to gain weight (breathing out is the only significant way your body expels mass - all that fat is turned into the carbon in the CO2 you breath out)
Even then, that's ludicrous. Prison should be used as a way of removing a dangerous person from society until they're no longer a danger. Even people who sell millions of pirated copies are not dangerous. Sure, they should face stiff financial penalties, and/or be made to repay society in some other way (community service etc), but prison is not the right place for them.
It sounds very similar to me. You're suggesting people limit their need for carbon (which their body will burn and form CO2 with), he's suggesting that they limit their need for oxygen (which their body will use to burn carbon and form CO2 with). I'm not sure how much more similar you can get.
Indeed, it's not beyond reasonable to expect that for example a bacteria that takes fibre and breaks it down into nice short sugars exists. That bacteria, were it to inhabit your gut, would cause you to greatly increase the amount of energy you actually absorb from most foods.
As for being able to do it. It's a matter of wanting and therefore motivation. That motivation can come from different sources.
That, and exactly what you are being asked to do. If your body absorbs 80% of the glucose in food (thanks to bacteria in your gut that break down starches into glucose), while an average human only consumes 60% (thanks to a lack of those bacteria), you are being asked to eat a significantly smaller amount of food. The result is that even if you have motivation, and more willpower than the other person, you may still not be able to control yourself, as you are being asked to control a greater urge than they are. You are being asked to keep your stomach less full than that less efficient human.
Honestly, my bet is that you're falling victim to the same thinking that makes people think that depressed people should "just feel happy". That is, if you can't see the issue on the outside, it can't possibly exist, or can't possibly be serious.
Given the mounting evidence that gut fauna is different in obese people, and the very strong correlations between both time periods in which we used antibiotics and obesity, and between geographical areas in which we use antibiotics and obesity, I'd say that this has a good chance of explaining why we have a huge issue in the western world with obesity being out of control, and people seemingly being unable to do anything about it.
The point being that "you" doing it may be very different from someone with different gut bacteria doing it. The amount of willpower needed for you to keep your food intake at a suitable level may be fairly high, but still doable. Meanwhile, the level of willpower needed for someone with different gut fauna may be more comparable to sjames' example - beyond that of the typical person.
The news here for me isn't "here's a way to analyse a city's obesity rate", it's just yet another piece of evidence for "obesity is caused primarily by gut fauna". This would seem to add up with the obese population's assertion that losing weight is incredibly hard, while the non-obese population asserts "just eat less, it's trivially easy". The only way these two assertions can add up is if the two populations have some very different environmental factor going on. Gut fauna making obese people absorb much more of the energy from their food would seem to add up as just that kind of environmental factor.
No, more like 1930s America. It's almost-legalised protection rackets. "Hey netflix, it would be a shame if something happened to your shop windows, wouldn't it. We'll take cash to help make sure that doesn't happen."
When it comes to goods and service taxes, or VAT etc, almost always. That's the point of said value added taxes - you pay tax only on the value you add, so any costs are 100% deductible against any gains.
Right, the way that this should work is like the british version of the 5th - that is you have the right to keep silent, and not tell the police/court something, but if you do keep silent and don't tell the police, then you can't use that in your defense later.
Basically, you have the right to not self incriminate yourself, but you don't have the right to be bolshy and just hide information for the sake of hiding it.
No, they knew that already and took it into account when they made their formula. Then they added some other predictors, e.g. being male (already known), being able to do a strenuous task, and your heart rate being able to clock up to a decent rate.
The latter two are the new ones.
Of course, this is slashdot, and if you incorporate any past knowledge into your new work, that work can't possibly be new or informative.
It's more likely that their research had some other useful reason for existing, and using "zombies" in their model was simply a lab joke that turned into a hook to get people to read the paper.
Nope, just different lighting conditions to you. The effect can be reproduced on absolutely perfect IPS displays, if you set up the lighting correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
You think people don't fight tooth and nail to get out of being in prison for their entire life?
The point of the bank of switches would be to cause reasonable doubt about which of the people did it. Your single switch would leave one person who's action (not inaction) caused a death.
That said, the rest of the comments in this thread are right, the correct way to execute someone in the 21st century is to not execute people in the 21st century.
Well, it's more expensive to execute people than to keep them in prison for life, so... Quite easily I'd imagine.
Yep, came here to say this. The solution is to realise that we're in the 21st century, and we no longer need any of this "eye for an eye" nonsense.
It's more expensive than life imprisonment, it's more likely to have catastrophic consequences if a miscarriage of justice occurs, and it's less of a punishment.
Right, it's not an interesting technical problem to render a scene with lots of interesting lighting effects. No one would ever want to read about that, because game play is more important.
"Most give less money than the competitors"...
You're asserting that the median wage is higher than the median wage. Your logic doesn't work very well.
That's a very strange assertion. It's kinda akin to "if there's half a million jobs out there, why are there people who don't have jobs". The answer is trivial - those people don't have the skills necessary to do those jobs. I can tell you for sure, hiring people who (for example) understand performance critical code, code that requires manual memory management, and code that requires you to think about how you're going to affect cache coherency when you do certain things, is incredibly hard. Add a couple of odd constraints like "has an understanding of linear algebra" or "knows how a compiler works", and you're likely to have extreme trouble finding anyone at all for the position.
You realise that when you take a flash photo, the flash should not be pointing at the subject in all but the rarest cases, right?
There's only one type of flash photography that needs the flash to point forwards - that's front filling (where you use the flash to try to even out dim lighting close to the camera, and bright lighting in the distance, and which is typically used for landscape photos)
For pretty much all other cases, instead, you want to bounce the flash off a large surface, to diffuse the light. Otherwise, all you get is photos with a big white specular dot right in the centre.
This is why when you look at a professional flash, you'll note that it tilts in all axes, rather than simply pointing forwards, like the crappy flashes they put on consumer cameras to try and even out their poor ISO response.
The problem with "prison is a punishment" is that it's a really crappy punishment. What society gets out of punishing someone with prison is a person who's become educated in the ways of criminals. That's not a valuable thing. Because of that, use of prison as a punishment should be avoided, and instead, other punishments (like community service) should be used. Then society gets something valuable from the person being punished, they potentially get educated in a task that they weren't before, and is useful to society, and we all win.
As I asserted before, prison should be reserved only for separating people from society when they are dangerous.
Except in one case you'll die within minutes, and in the other you can survive for weeks*.
Attempting to equate the two does nobody any favors.
Okay, so there's a difference in scale. That only means that there's a difference in scale of how much you limit it.
That doesn't mean that the concept is fundamentally flawed.
Note - don't actually try the breathing thing, it'll cause you to gain weight (breathing out is the only significant way your body expels mass - all that fat is turned into the carbon in the CO2 you breath out)
Even then, that's ludicrous. Prison should be used as a way of removing a dangerous person from society until they're no longer a danger. Even people who sell millions of pirated copies are not dangerous. Sure, they should face stiff financial penalties, and/or be made to repay society in some other way (community service etc), but prison is not the right place for them.
It sounds very similar to me. You're suggesting people limit their need for carbon (which their body will burn and form CO2 with), he's suggesting that they limit their need for oxygen (which their body will use to burn carbon and form CO2 with). I'm not sure how much more similar you can get.
Indeed, it's not beyond reasonable to expect that for example a bacteria that takes fibre and breaks it down into nice short sugars exists. That bacteria, were it to inhabit your gut, would cause you to greatly increase the amount of energy you actually absorb from most foods.
As for being able to do it. It's a matter of wanting and therefore motivation. That motivation can come from different sources.
That, and exactly what you are being asked to do. If your body absorbs 80% of the glucose in food (thanks to bacteria in your gut that break down starches into glucose), while an average human only consumes 60% (thanks to a lack of those bacteria), you are being asked to eat a significantly smaller amount of food. The result is that even if you have motivation, and more willpower than the other person, you may still not be able to control yourself, as you are being asked to control a greater urge than they are. You are being asked to keep your stomach less full than that less efficient human.
Honestly, my bet is that you're falling victim to the same thinking that makes people think that depressed people should "just feel happy". That is, if you can't see the issue on the outside, it can't possibly exist, or can't possibly be serious.
Given the mounting evidence that gut fauna is different in obese people, and the very strong correlations between both time periods in which we used antibiotics and obesity, and between geographical areas in which we use antibiotics and obesity, I'd say that this has a good chance of explaining why we have a huge issue in the western world with obesity being out of control, and people seemingly being unable to do anything about it.
The point being that "you" doing it may be very different from someone with different gut bacteria doing it. The amount of willpower needed for you to keep your food intake at a suitable level may be fairly high, but still doable. Meanwhile, the level of willpower needed for someone with different gut fauna may be more comparable to sjames' example - beyond that of the typical person.
The news here for me isn't "here's a way to analyse a city's obesity rate", it's just yet another piece of evidence for "obesity is caused primarily by gut fauna". This would seem to add up with the obese population's assertion that losing weight is incredibly hard, while the non-obese population asserts "just eat less, it's trivially easy". The only way these two assertions can add up is if the two populations have some very different environmental factor going on. Gut fauna making obese people absorb much more of the energy from their food would seem to add up as just that kind of environmental factor.
No, more like 1930s America. It's almost-legalised protection rackets. "Hey netflix, it would be a shame if something happened to your shop windows, wouldn't it. We'll take cash to help make sure that doesn't happen."
When it comes to goods and service taxes, or VAT etc, almost always. That's the point of said value added taxes - you pay tax only on the value you add, so any costs are 100% deductible against any gains.
Right, the way that this should work is like the british version of the 5th - that is you have the right to keep silent, and not tell the police/court something, but if you do keep silent and don't tell the police, then you can't use that in your defense later.
Basically, you have the right to not self incriminate yourself, but you don't have the right to be bolshy and just hide information for the sake of hiding it.
No, they knew that already and took it into account when they made their formula. Then they added some other predictors, e.g. being male (already known), being able to do a strenuous task, and your heart rate being able to clock up to a decent rate.
The latter two are the new ones.
Of course, this is slashdot, and if you incorporate any past knowledge into your new work, that work can't possibly be new or informative.
It's more likely that their research had some other useful reason for existing, and using "zombies" in their model was simply a lab joke that turned into a hook to get people to read the paper.
Nope, just different lighting conditions to you. The effect can be reproduced on absolutely perfect IPS displays, if you set up the lighting correctly.
Right, and then you're somewhat bound to give the "right" result, because otherwise they won't fund more research.
Hence the conflict of interest.
Right, and merging word documents is going to work really well too >.