so that they can be narrowly channeled into their chosen field of study
I was just reading a short sci-fi story in which the government used this exact thing to keep scientists in the dark. They were allowed to do work in nothing but their own little area of expertise. The government had a time machine, but kept very tight control over it. A scientist in a vaguely related field (gravity optics?) has a chance encounter with another scientist, and they discuss their work. One of their uncles is a Technical Writer, and he has a basic/good understanding of many different fields. Together, they work on creating their own time machine. Turns out the original machine was a fake all along, but they end up building a real one. The government arrives to shut them down, fearing the consequences of a machine that can look back thru time (people would 'playback' the goodtimes over and over, or voyeuristically watch other people. Then there's the fact you can set it to look back just a fraction of a second into the past, and effective have a real-time spying device.) But the uncle mailed copies of the plans to every other technical writer on the planet....
Why is it always the OLD folks who want to do stuff 'for the children'? Is alzheimer's that severe in our aging population that they have totally forgotten what it's like to be a child?
Silly me, I thought a brush fire was just that- brush (grass, bushes, maybe trees) on fire. Those burn a lot cooler than an oxy-acetylene mix. A concrete, brick, or earth-bermed house should easily be able to withstand an ordinary brush fire. But not one of those 3,480 C California brush fires.
figures like that refer to a theoretical upper limit
So, the $39.99* the customer pays should be a 'theoretical upper limit', too, right?
(*or whatever)
if you don't like the service, stop your subscription
I'm not a Comcast subscriber. Thank God.
You obviously have figured out what you are and are not getting for your money.
What the subscribers are getting:
An internet connection that is supposed to be 'X' speed, but actually can be anything from 0 to 'X'. A Service that doesn't allow almost everythign you'd want an internet connection for Lies and deception
What they are NOT getting:
A "4mbps" pipe that allows them to download... well, 4mbps. the truth 'unlimited' internet access
No, it merely says that you get a 4Mbps connection
You do know what the "Mbps" means, right? Mega bits per second. The definition of a "4Mbps connection" is that I can download 4 million bits per second over it. WHich is what I said.
But it is an advertisment for their service. Do you think it fair that they say one thing in their ads, and another thing in the 'fine print'? I call that deceptive, and... false advertising.
you get 4Mbps
In other words, for each second that passes, I am allowed to download 4 million bits.
In a 30-day month, there are 10368000000000 seconds, so I am allowed to download 41472000000000 bits in that 30-day month.
It's simple math.
The TOS say that Comcast can, at their sole discretion, decide whether your usage is acceptable
So, you are perfectly fine with Comcast taking your money, and deciding to offer you NO service whatsoever? Because that's perfectly allowable using that clause in the TOS.
You seem to be defending the practice of saying one thing in plain english, a completely different thing in legalese. What you call acceptable business practice, I call fraud.
More importantly, the TOS say that you cannot run file sharing at all, period.
Their AUP (Acceptable Use Policy, not the TOS) also prohibits such things as:
- downloading legal porn (... any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be pornographic... regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful)
- Accessing a web site al all (access any other person's computer or computer system, software, or data without their knowledge and consent) Do you have the "knowlege and consent" of every webmaster whose sites you browse to??
- in fact- you can't use their service at all (... or otherwise cause a performance degradation to any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) facilities used to deliver the Service) Since your use will use up cpu cycles of their routers, and the loss of those cycles will "cause a performance degradation" for the other people also using that router.
- You can't set up a home network (connect multiple computers behind the cable modem to set up a LAN (Local Area Network)...)
It also says: Comcast reserves the right, but not the obligation, to refuse to transmit or post and to remove or block any information or materials, in whole or in part, that it, in its sole discretion, deems to be offensive, indecent, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful. Which means they can block your data if they think it is "offensive". This is a re-playing of the ATT thing from the other week- they can say that your 'comcast suck as an ISP' posting is "offensive" and not allow you to post, or even drop you as a subscriber. Heck, they can drop any packets that contain a '0' if they claim a zero is 'offensive' to them, under that clause.
Lastly, they do say You shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict... represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network , but THEY DO NOT SAY WHAT THAT MEANS. They hold you to limitations they refuse to tell you.
The point is, 'the big print giveth, the the small print taketh away'. I find that to be deceptive. And wrong. Legal, perhaps, but wrong.
how will the robots create a new solar panel if a panel is damaged
1) Over-size the array, so a few dead/damaged panels wouldn't matter. 2) Have a stock of spares. Robots cut bad panel loose, push into sun, slap spare panel into place. 3) We could ship up a stack of spares every so often.
he has some examples of sentences that are "scrambled" according to that rule, but are mostly unreadable
I'd say it's because of the unfamiliarity of the words in the harder-to-read examples. I mean, "pensioner", "manslaughter"? Many people are eithe runfamiliar with these words, or at least unfamiliar with their correct spelling, so it's not a surprise they can't understand them scrambled.
So my lotto printer was jammed and I was waiting for someone from tech support to call back. So I hung up a sign that said: "Our lotto machine is temporarily unavailble. We cannot print or check lotto tickets at this time." Now anyone with half a fucking brain would look at that and understand it. Except this cranky old lady, she just stands there and I walk up and ask if she needs help. She points to my sign and says, "What does this mean?"
See? Even looking at a perfectly comprehensible notice, people still don't understand what it means. So, I'm sure I could make the 'gear up' indicator be a 2-foot high neon sign, flashing, with an alarm klaxon, and stupid people will still either miss it, or ignore it.
This a problem with the stupidity of the person, NOT the obviousness of the indicator.
it wasn't designed in a way that would make it immediately obvious to a pilot whether or not the gear was up or down,/i>
Why did it need to be "immediately obvious"? The pilot should take the extra 2 seconds to verify the gear was in the correct strate. The fact they didn't makes it 'pilot error'.
The fact that all these circumstances surround it is a political reality that you're not going to escape through legislation.
"Members of the Jury, how do you find?" "Guilty, your Honor." "Bailiff, take the guilty man out behind the courthouse and put a bullet thru his skull."
There- a way around all the legal BS. We just need to change the law to allow for immediate executions.
and some NON-murderers, which is the whole point here.
And when I walk down the sidewalk, I step on an occasional ant. I'm not concerned about that, and I'm not concerned about an occasional innocent person being put to death. Shit happens. Sucks to be that person, yes. But that scenario would be extremely rare if everyone involved in the case was held responsible as I suggest.
If the justice system kills someone innocent due in part to your support of the death penalty, it's on your head,
Nope. It's on the head of whoever screwed up.
Well I wouldn't starve to death, because I live on a farm... where you produce EVERYTHING you need to survive??
eliminate non-cargo traffic, and pedestrian deaths dwindle to near zero, while the benefits of internal combustion engine vehicles persist.
So now "near zero" deaths is acceptable. Make up your mind.
Besides, I've so far left out the fact that with lengthy appeals processes, the cost of executing prisoners is very well on par with keeping them incarcerated.
There are TWO solutions to that: Abandon the Death penalty and keep people locked up for life, OR eliminate the lengthy appeals processes. You favor the former, I favor the latter. Both solutions will keep the killers away from the rest of society (discounting early releases and escapes), but one is much cheaper.
you continue to argue that saving money is worth having bloody hands, and for me, that makes your opinion pretty much irrelevant.
And you seem to want to waste other people's money (including MINE) on keeping killers alive and in good health, so they can be released in 5 years to kill again, or in the most extreme cases, for life.
Generating fuel from algae or bacteria would be so much better on so many levels than fermenting corn, I really hope it comes to fruition
I'm waiting for some smart company to engineer a [baterium/algae/whatever] to eat waste cellulose (read: sawdust, woodchips, grass clippings, etc) and excrete a hydro-carbon. Imagine being able to dump your grass clippings into a drum, add a few gallons of water, and a packet of bacteria, and a few days later, siphon off gallons of ethanol.
People who are pro basically say it's worth to have a few innocent deaths if it means we can keep the death-penalty going and kill guilty ones as well. I find this argumentation absurd, and hypocrite.
Do you drive?
People who are pro[driving] basically say it's worth to have a few innocent deaths if it means we can keep driving cars around. Do you "find this argumentation absurd, and hypocrite"?
If YOU were the one facing death when being innocent, would you still promote the death-penalty?
Yes.
All other things being equal, who will have - generally speaking - the most chance of finding a job: a white male, or a black male?
As a minority, there are openings available to a black man that a white man can not even apply for. So, I'd say the black man... IF he bothers to look for a job.
Why do - for the *same* kind of crimes - white people get consistently less jail time then black people?
Firstly, you assume the crimes are the same when they may not actually be. Second, you assume there is no context. (Person A may go quietly when arrested, Person B may fight and get charged with Resisting Arrest. When they get sentenced, Person B, as more of a danger than Person A, gets a longer sentence.) Third, you assume no history. A person with a history of other offenses will naturally get a longer sentence for 'the same crime' as a first-time offender.
So, what, about 1/3 of prisoners are "rehabilitated"? With such an excellent record as that, I'm surprised there's any crime at all.
b) the prison system is incorrectly set up as a punitive instead of a rehabilitating system,/i>
It's supposed to be punative. If a puppy craps the floor, you don't send him to therapy to 'rehabilitate'- you whack him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. To avoid getting whacked, the dog learns not to crap on the floor. This is animal training 101- use pain to stop bad behavior and pleasure to reward good behavior.* Now, with humans, we are intelligent. We can see the pain that others are going thru, and don't necessarilly need to be subjected to it ourselves. But what lesson do we learn when career criminals are let out after only a few years, to rob and kill again?
*Even training methods that don't use physical punishment use mental and emotional punishment. That's why you yell "DOWN Boy" or "NO, Boy" at the dog- to assert your dominance and make the dog feel bad it's doing something against your will. Yes, it's more complex than that, but that's what it boils down to.
perhaps you should do some research
The only reason Death penalty cases cost so much is because of the many appeals. Toughen the penalties for wrongful convictions, and get the verdict right the first time, then cut out the appeals.
you don't fuck around with anything that could be taken for a bomb in an airport.
But the point is, to any reasonable, thinking person with two neurons to rub together, what she had could not be "taken for a bomb".
And if you disagree with that, then please answer this: Which of the following could NOT be 'taken for a bomb' by a sufficiently stupid or paranoid person?? 1) A laptop that was left in 'sleep ' mode until the battery died, so the passenger can't turn it on for the TSA guy. 2) A guy whipping out an **OH-MY-GOD**-It's an Electronic device with blinky ligh... er, it's just a cell phone. Nevermind. 3) A kid playing with a Gameboy... or is it? 4) A bottle of water.
I don't know what "mis-interperated" means
misinterpreted - interpreted in the wrong way
A terrorist wearing some sort of device in an obvious fashion is just as deadly as a more discreet terrorist if they are treated the same way.
The point is, a terrorist wouldn't wear their suicide bomb visibly. Kinda defeats the purpose. So, anyone wearing a device visible is most likely not a terrorist. Worth a second look, yes. By all means. Send someone who knows what they are doing over to take a second look, ask a few questions. But don't freak out and point guns at someone because they have a blinky light on them. Before this incident, I would have said that was an over-reacetion. And now I've been proven right.
Well, then you pressed the button because you were misinformed, not by accident, right?
But my being misinformed was accidental.
Do not execute people, and you will have a nice zero in your "wrongly killed" column.
And a huge negative in the 'money', 'safety', and 'sanity' columns.
Keeping prisoners costs money. That's a fact. Why keep providing all the comforts of home (heat, light, food, tv, reading materials, internet acces, etc) for life to a person who has proven themselves to be a danger to Society? The rest of us out here in the 'real world' have to work our asses off for these things. Why should bad people get given stuff and the Good people have to work twice as hard? What kind of logic is that?
Prisoners do occassionally escape. No executed prisoner has escaped their coffin to kill again.
I'm willing to accept some 'innocent'* people being killed by our admittedly imperfect system, as long as we seek to perfect that system.
I don't support the death penalty because it has been shown that it is NOT an effective crime deterrent
We've never had an actual Death Penalty.
We have a IF-you-commit-a-bad-enough-crime,-in-the-'wrong'-part-of-the-country,-and-you're-a-certain-race,-and-the-prosecutor-needs-to-be-re-elected,-and-the-risk-of-riots-isn't-to-big,-and-the-jury-doesn't-feel-too-sorry-for-you,-and-none-of-your-mandatory-appeals-work,-and-the-press-doesn't-work-up-too-much-sympathy-for-you,-and-the-governer-doesn't-need-the-minority-vote-this-year,-then-after-40-years-you-might-get-put-to-Death-Penalty.
It's a far, far different thing.
You'll get to save a few dollars a year and a few people will die for it. Seems like an even trade to me.
A few MURDERERS will die.
middle class white folks are the most numerous population group, and the least likely to be executed.
Correlation is not causation. Perhaps "middle class white folks" commit fewer murders?
you'd rather have $22.03/year in savings than a clean societal conscience
There is no such thing.
I for one, oppose my government killing anyone in my name.
No one uses your name.
It actually is a perfect method... no one innocent dies from that
Depends on how you define 'perfect'. Getting rid of all automobiles would result in the elimination of pedestrian deaths. You could say that is a 'perfect' solution... until you starve to death because the trucks that bring food to your local grocery store no longer exist.
Slashdot Mirror
so that they can be narrowly channeled into their chosen field of study
I was just reading a short sci-fi story in which the government used this exact thing to keep scientists in the dark. They were allowed to do work in nothing but their own little area of expertise. The government had a time machine, but kept very tight control over it. A scientist in a vaguely related field (gravity optics?) has a chance encounter with another scientist, and they discuss their work. One of their uncles is a Technical Writer, and he has a basic/good understanding of many different fields. Together, they work on creating their own time machine. Turns out the original machine was a fake all along, but they end up building a real one. The government arrives to shut them down, fearing the consequences of a machine that can look back thru time (people would 'playback' the goodtimes over and over, or voyeuristically watch other people. Then there's the fact you can set it to look back just a fraction of a second into the past, and effective have a real-time spying device.) But the uncle mailed copies of the plans to every other technical writer on the planet....
Why is it always the OLD folks who want to do stuff 'for the children'? Is alzheimer's that severe in our aging population that they have totally forgotten what it's like to be a child?
Silly me, I thought a brush fire was just that- brush (grass, bushes, maybe trees) on fire. Those burn a lot cooler than an oxy-acetylene mix. A concrete, brick, or earth-bermed house should easily be able to withstand an ordinary brush fire. But not one of those 3,480 C California brush fires.
Um, no. Concrete does not burn.* At least not under real-world brush-fire conditions. Neither do steel or brick. Or aluminum siding.
Sheesh CA, you're as bad as the people in New Orleans.
*Yeah, yeah, theoretically....
No, because 'stealing' cars deprives their original owner of them.
COpying cars, on the other hand....
figures like that refer to a theoretical upper limit
So, the $39.99* the customer pays should be a 'theoretical upper limit', too, right?
(*or whatever)
if you don't like the service, stop your subscription
I'm not a Comcast subscriber. Thank God.
You obviously have figured out what you are and are not getting for your money.
What the subscribers are getting:
An internet connection that is supposed to be 'X' speed, but actually can be anything from 0 to 'X'.
A Service that doesn't allow almost everythign you'd want an internet connection for
Lies and deception
What they are NOT getting:
A "4mbps" pipe that allows them to download... well, 4mbps.
the truth
'unlimited' internet access
No, it merely says that you get a 4Mbps connection
You do know what the "Mbps" means, right? Mega bits per second. The definition of a "4Mbps connection" is that I can download 4 million bits per second over it. WHich is what I said.
That's not ther TOS.
... false advertising.
But it is an advertisment for their service. Do you think it fair that they say one thing in their ads, and another thing in the 'fine print'? I call that deceptive, and
you get 4Mbps
In other words, for each second that passes, I am allowed to download 4 million bits.
In a 30-day month, there are 10368000000000 seconds, so I am allowed to download 41472000000000 bits in that 30-day month.
It's simple math.
The TOS say that Comcast can, at their sole discretion, decide whether your usage is acceptable
So, you are perfectly fine with Comcast taking your money, and deciding to offer you NO service whatsoever? Because that's perfectly allowable using that clause in the TOS.
You seem to be defending the practice of saying one thing in plain english, a completely different thing in legalese. What you call acceptable business practice, I call fraud.
More importantly, the TOS say that you cannot run file sharing at all, period.
Their AUP (Acceptable Use Policy, not the TOS) also prohibits such things as:
- downloading legal porn (... any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be pornographic... regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful)
- Accessing a web site al all (access any other person's computer or computer system, software, or data without their knowledge and consent) Do you have the "knowlege and consent" of every webmaster whose sites you browse to??
- in fact- you can't use their service at all (... or otherwise cause a performance degradation to any Comcast (or Comcast supplier) facilities used to deliver the Service) Since your use will use up cpu cycles of their routers, and the loss of those cycles will "cause a performance degradation" for the other people also using that router.
- You can't set up a home network (connect multiple computers behind the cable modem to set up a LAN (Local Area Network)...)
It also says:
Comcast reserves the right, but not the obligation, to refuse to transmit or post and to remove or block any information or materials, in whole or in part, that it, in its sole discretion, deems to be offensive, indecent, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful.
Which means they can block your data if they think it is "offensive". This is a re-playing of the ATT thing from the other week- they can say that your 'comcast suck as an ISP' posting is "offensive" and not allow you to post, or even drop you as a subscriber. Heck, they can drop any packets that contain a '0' if they claim a zero is 'offensive' to them, under that clause.
Lastly, they do say You shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict... represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network , but THEY DO NOT SAY WHAT THAT MEANS. They hold you to limitations they refuse to tell you.
The point is, 'the big print giveth, the the small print taketh away'. I find that to be deceptive. And wrong. Legal, perhaps, but wrong.
Please tell me where in this page, the phrase "burst bandwidth' appears:
http://www.comcast.com/Customers/FAQ/FaqDetails.ashx?Id=2580
All I see is a speed expressed in "Kbps", or Kilobits per second. On another page, they say "Your time spent online is completely unlimited..."
SO, each month, they are offering 'X' Kbps * number of seconds in the month
ANything less than that is false advertisement.
how will the robots create a new solar panel if a panel is damaged
1) Over-size the array, so a few dead/damaged panels wouldn't matter.
2) Have a stock of spares. Robots cut bad panel loose, push into sun, slap spare panel into place.
3) We could ship up a stack of spares every so often.
you are selling [something] whether or not you actually sold any
Um, no, you aren't, by definition.
he has some examples of sentences that are "scrambled" according to that rule, but are mostly unreadable
I'd say it's because of the unfamiliarity of the words in the harder-to-read examples. I mean, "pensioner", "manslaughter"? Many people are eithe runfamiliar with these words, or at least unfamiliar with their correct spelling, so it's not a surprise they can't understand them scrambled.
Stupid people will miss even the most obvious of indicators. See, for instance, many of the postings at Customerssuck.com. For instance http://www.customerssuck.com/board/showthread.php?t=3527&highlight=sign
So my lotto printer was jammed and I was waiting for someone from tech support to call back. So I hung up a sign that said:
"Our lotto machine is temporarily unavailble. We cannot print or check lotto tickets at this time."
Now anyone with half a fucking brain would look at that and understand it.
Except this cranky old lady, she just stands there and I walk up and ask if she needs help. She points to my sign and says, "What does this mean?"
See? Even looking at a perfectly comprehensible notice, people still don't understand what it means. So, I'm sure I could make the 'gear up' indicator be a 2-foot high neon sign, flashing, with an alarm klaxon, and stupid people will still either miss it, or ignore it.
This a problem with the stupidity of the person, NOT the obviousness of the indicator.
See? See?!? Slashdot didn't make it "immediately obvious" that I failed to close my tag properly. Blame Slashdot!!
it wasn't designed in a way that would make it immediately obvious to a pilot whether or not the gear was up or down,/i>
Why did it need to be "immediately obvious"? The pilot should take the extra 2 seconds to verify the gear was in the correct strate. The fact they didn't makes it 'pilot error'.
But you have to oxygenate the wort (unfermented beer/wine) before hand
SO, bubble some air thru it. We have been aerating water in aquariums for decades.
and then nurse it along under very specific temperature conditions
So... a heater hooked up to a thermostat. Maybe a way to cool it, depending.
and use a specially bred strain of yeast not avalible to the public
So... it's have to be made available. Like I said, "I'm waiting for some smart company" to do something like that.
Um, ethanol floats on water, so you can just siphon off the top layer.
It is also possible, IF distillation is still needed, the SUN can provide the heat.
The fact that all these circumstances surround it is a political reality that you're not going to escape through legislation.
.. where you produce EVERYTHING you need to survive??
"Members of the Jury, how do you find?"
"Guilty, your Honor."
"Bailiff, take the guilty man out behind the courthouse and put a bullet thru his skull."
There- a way around all the legal BS. We just need to change the law to allow for immediate executions.
and some NON-murderers, which is the whole point here.
And when I walk down the sidewalk, I step on an occasional ant. I'm not concerned about that, and I'm not concerned about an occasional innocent person being put to death. Shit happens. Sucks to be that person, yes. But that scenario would be extremely rare if everyone involved in the case was held responsible as I suggest.
If the justice system kills someone innocent due in part to your support of the death penalty, it's on your head,
Nope. It's on the head of whoever screwed up.
Well I wouldn't starve to death, because I live on a farm.
eliminate non-cargo traffic, and pedestrian deaths dwindle to near zero, while the benefits of internal combustion engine vehicles persist.
So now "near zero" deaths is acceptable. Make up your mind.
Besides, I've so far left out the fact that with lengthy appeals processes, the cost of executing prisoners is very well on par with keeping them incarcerated.
There are TWO solutions to that: Abandon the Death penalty and keep people locked up for life, OR eliminate the lengthy appeals processes. You favor the former, I favor the latter. Both solutions will keep the killers away from the rest of society (discounting early releases and escapes), but one is much cheaper.
you continue to argue that saving money is worth having bloody hands, and for me, that makes your opinion pretty much irrelevant.
And you seem to want to waste other people's money (including MINE) on keeping killers alive and in good health, so they can be released in 5 years to kill again, or in the most extreme cases, for life.
Generating fuel from algae or bacteria would be so much better on so many levels than fermenting corn, I really hope it comes to fruition
I'm waiting for some smart company to engineer a [baterium/algae/whatever] to eat waste cellulose (read: sawdust, woodchips, grass clippings, etc) and excrete a hydro-carbon. Imagine being able to dump your grass clippings into a drum, add a few gallons of water, and a packet of bacteria, and a few days later, siphon off gallons of ethanol.
People who are pro basically say it's worth to have a few innocent deaths if it means we can keep the death-penalty going and kill guilty ones as well. I find this argumentation absurd, and hypocrite.
Do you drive?
People who are pro[driving] basically say it's worth to have a few innocent deaths if it means we can keep driving cars around. Do you "find this argumentation absurd, and hypocrite"?
If YOU were the one facing death when being innocent, would you still promote the death-penalty?
Yes.
All other things being equal, who will have - generally speaking - the most chance of finding a job: a white male, or a black male?
As a minority, there are openings available to a black man that a white man can not even apply for. So, I'd say the black man... IF he bothers to look for a job.
Why do - for the *same* kind of crimes - white people get consistently less jail time then black people?
Firstly, you assume the crimes are the same when they may not actually be.
Second, you assume there is no context. (Person A may go quietly when arrested, Person B may fight and get charged with Resisting Arrest. When they get sentenced, Person B, as more of a danger than Person A, gets a longer sentence.)
Third, you assume no history. A person with a history of other offenses will naturally get a longer sentence for 'the same crime' as a first-time offender.
Good point.
recidivism rates are not 100%, more like 60-70%
So, what, about 1/3 of prisoners are "rehabilitated"? With such an excellent record as that, I'm surprised there's any crime at all.
b) the prison system is incorrectly set up as a punitive instead of a rehabilitating system,/i>
It's supposed to be punative. If a puppy craps the floor, you don't send him to therapy to 'rehabilitate'- you whack him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. To avoid getting whacked, the dog learns not to crap on the floor.
This is animal training 101- use pain to stop bad behavior and pleasure to reward good behavior.*
Now, with humans, we are intelligent. We can see the pain that others are going thru, and don't necessarilly need to be subjected to it ourselves. But what lesson do we learn when career criminals are let out after only a few years, to rob and kill again?
*Even training methods that don't use physical punishment use mental and emotional punishment. That's why you yell "DOWN Boy" or "NO, Boy" at the dog- to assert your dominance and make the dog feel bad it's doing something against your will. Yes, it's more complex than that, but that's what it boils down to.
perhaps you should do some research
The only reason Death penalty cases cost so much is because of the many appeals. Toughen the penalties for wrongful convictions, and get the verdict right the first time, then cut out the appeals.
you don't fuck around with anything that could be taken for a bomb in an airport.
But the point is, to any reasonable, thinking person with two neurons to rub together, what she had could not be "taken for a bomb".
And if you disagree with that, then please answer this: Which of the following could NOT be 'taken for a bomb' by a sufficiently stupid or paranoid person??
1) A laptop that was left in 'sleep ' mode until the battery died, so the passenger can't turn it on for the TSA guy.
2) A guy whipping out an **OH-MY-GOD**-It's an Electronic device with blinky ligh... er, it's just a cell phone. Nevermind.
3) A kid playing with a Gameboy... or is it?
4) A bottle of water.
I don't know what "mis-interperated" means
misinterpreted - interpreted in the wrong way
A terrorist wearing some sort of device in an obvious fashion is just as deadly as a more discreet terrorist if they are treated the same way.
The point is, a terrorist wouldn't wear their suicide bomb visibly. Kinda defeats the purpose. So, anyone wearing a device visible is most likely not a terrorist. Worth a second look, yes. By all means. Send someone who knows what they are doing over to take a second look, ask a few questions. But don't freak out and point guns at someone because they have a blinky light on them. Before this incident, I would have said that was an over-reacetion. And now I've been proven right.
Well, then you pressed the button because you were misinformed, not by accident, right?
But my being misinformed was accidental.
Do not execute people, and you will have a nice zero in your "wrongly killed" column.
And a huge negative in the 'money', 'safety', and 'sanity' columns.
Keeping prisoners costs money. That's a fact. Why keep providing all the comforts of home (heat, light, food, tv, reading materials, internet acces, etc) for life to a person who has proven themselves to be a danger to Society? The rest of us out here in the 'real world' have to work our asses off for these things. Why should bad people get given stuff and the Good people have to work twice as hard? What kind of logic is that?
Prisoners do occassionally escape. No executed prisoner has escaped their coffin to kill again.
I'm willing to accept some 'innocent'* people being killed by our admittedly imperfect system, as long as we seek to perfect that system.
*No-one is truely innocent.
You're mixing sides of the analogy.
I don't support the death penalty because it has been shown that it is NOT an effective crime deterrent
We've never had an actual Death Penalty.
We have a IF-you-commit-a-bad-enough-crime,-in-the-'wrong'-part-of-the-country,-and-you're-a-certain-race,-and-the-prosecutor-needs-to-be-re-elected,-and-the-risk-of-riots-isn't-to-big,-and-the-jury-doesn't-feel-too-sorry-for-you,-and-none-of-your-mandatory-appeals-work,-and-the-press-doesn't-work-up-too-much-sympathy-for-you,-and-the-governer-doesn't-need-the-minority-vote-this-year,-then-after-40-years-you-might-get-put-to-Death-Penalty.
It's a far, far different thing.
You'll get to save a few dollars a year and a few people will die for it. Seems like an even trade to me.
A few MURDERERS will die.
middle class white folks are the most numerous population group, and the least likely to be executed.
Correlation is not causation. Perhaps "middle class white folks" commit fewer murders?
you'd rather have $22.03/year in savings than a clean societal conscience
There is no such thing.
I for one, oppose my government killing anyone in my name.
No one uses your name.
It actually is a perfect method... no one innocent dies from that
Depends on how you define 'perfect'. Getting rid of all automobiles would result in the elimination of pedestrian deaths. You could say that is a 'perfect' solution... until you starve to death because the trucks that bring food to your local grocery store no longer exist.