I'd go a step further and pay them whatever a public defender would be getting - if not their own normal wages plus 20%, with an additional compensation to their employer for the deprivation of their contributions.
Sure, it would cost money, but it would probably suddenly give everybody incentive to actually be on a jury and attentive to the case.
The judge and lawyers are essential to the process of justice, and yet for whatever reason they don't have to do it for $5/day.
We might want to note that the reason the payments are crazy figures like $5/day is that they were probably codified into law at a time when that actually was a significant compensation (you know, back when bread and milk cost a few pennies despite farms requiring 50% of the population to keep them running).
Well, the only difference today is that it can actually happen while in the box. Jurors used to talk about trials all the time - there is just no way to prove it.
At work when we implement electronic systems we often find ourselves detecting violations of process (sometimes with legal ramifications). Obviously these get addressed, but often the debate comes up over whether the electronic system is causing the problems. Usually the conclusion ends up being that most likely the problem had always existed, but the electronic system made it detectable.
As information becomes more and more available we'll find that almost everybody is a criminal by legal standards, and that almost everybody does stuff that most people would find distasteful. So, we can either punish ourselves collectively, or we can learn to adjust our standards to what has always been reality.
I don't think the important question is whether jurors have preconceptions, or if they talk to others about a case. I think the important question is whether in the end they are willing to look at the totality of the evidence and come to an honest conclusion about it. The problem is that the former tends to be easier to measure than the latter, and so that is what people tend to go after. It might change when it becomes impossible to run a trial to completion without putting half the jury pool in jail.
You say that like the judge and lawyers aren't walking around with cell phones, and as if they never lose attention during rambling testimony after lunch.
People are just complicated machines. They're machines that simply aren't designed to sit in a box and stare with razor-sharp attention at somebody else sitting in a box going on and on about something. The design of modern trials is about convenience and efficiency for the court - not effectiveness.
When you use a machine to do something that it isn't designed to do, then sometimes it doesn't do the job the way you want it to. Complaining about that won't change it (much). You'll get further by recognizing the flaws of humans and then working within those constraints.
I don't see any issue with allowing the use of calculators - if I had to multiple by a number like 29 I'd grab one or punch it into Google. Would I be unable to do so if trapped on an island - of course not. However, not using a calculator is a waste of time and greatly increases the opportunity for error.
Of course, just order-of-magnitude usually lets you solve problems like this on a multiple choice test. Actually, in the case of how many days until the cash runs out, you could deduce the answer from the wording of the choices even if the numbers in the question were obscured (but not the numbers in the answer choices). Of course, anybody able to reason that out logically probably would have no problem at all with just doing the math.
If I saw a teenage boy taking about visibility on MRI and Photoacoustic imaging my first assumption would be that they had help. This is graduate-level stuff. In fact, before even reading your post I had read the summaries of the other award-winners and that was my impression in all cases.
This just isn't science-fair stuff.
From experience with my kids and school projects 95% of them are tests of parental ability and willingness to spend time on the project. It is rare to see a middle school student handed a project they can actually complete based on skills and knowledge obtained at school. Of course parents should be involved at some level, but I've seen many projects that simply required the parent to basically do the whole thing and just explain to the kid what was going on the whole time. Either that, or let the kid give it his best shot and end up at the bottom of the pile. Just another arms race...
Yup - the real advantage in our society is being able to get picked. This seems a lot like the selection process that takes place at the animal shelter - the selective advantage is not based on survivability, but the ability to get picked by a good benefactor.
Sure, you get the odd case of individual achievement, but in many cases those who are ahead were chosen to be such.
They aren't meant to be attractive to men. They're meant to portray what women think that men want them to be. Men don't like bones, but women think they do, so they're more likely to buy something that they think will make them more boney.
Half the stuff women do to make themselves more attractive is based on mis-conceptions...
Women don't buy clothes to look like themselves wearing those clothes. They buy clothes to look like the model. Sure, they don't consciously think that way, but they do.
When Toyota publishes an annual statement do you think they get a picture of a bunch of sweaty guys working on their lines? No, they bring in a few models off-hours and dress them in uniforms and pose them.
When the local church puts some clip-art on their bulletins they don't take pictures of ordinary-looking people standing around in the lobby or whatever. They find some picture of a 22-year-old attractive couple holding a coffee chatting with another 22-year-old attractive couple. One couple will definitely be white, and the other will definitely be a minority of some sort. You'll never see an implied inter-racial couple or anything "dirty" like that. And, you definitely won't see fat people anywhere in sight.
Face it, people are superficial, and everybody doing marketing knows it...
Well, finally we need to reproduce the myth itself. We're wondering if replacing the batteries with C4 and using a blasting cap to trigger a detonation will cause an explosion. Better test that!
Wow, look, loading something up with explosives and setting them off does in deed blow it up. Science moves on!
Now, I do not really like to be a cynic, but I just cannot imagine that big pharma will put up the money to actually cure something. There just is not the same profit margin as there is for treatments.
In the short term the profits are still there.
Why is it that conspiracy theorists all think that no company is capable of thinking beyond the end of the current quarter, except for Pharmaceutical companies which are all unified in this 30-year plan to milk as much money out of health care as possible and they'll resist any 5-year huge surge in profits so that the next 5 CEOs in line after them can have a 10% higher rate of return and they can have mediocre performance?
Companies still research vaccines, which are as close to cures as we can come today. Granted, not many do it, for the reasons you state. However, if somebody came up with the cure for cancer no CEO would say "no, I don't want to make $50B more dollars in the next 5 years and $500M in bonuses because then after I retire the company might go downhill." They're quite content to send the company downhill to squeeze an extra $50M on the bottom line.
Just because a compound was licensed doesn't mean that it is without development cost. In fact, the main reason that companies license out their drugs in the first place is to avoid these development costs (I'm talking about licensing in R&D - not sales partnerships which happen in all industries and generally have different drivers).
Drug companies pay tons of money to license compounds that don't work out and don't make a dime. When they do work out they need to recoup the investment for both the successful and failed drugs. And the costs either way are very large - the phase 2/3 clinical trials are the biggest costs in the whole development process and usually compounds are licensed before they reach this stage (or the licensing costs end up being gargantuan).
I agree that US pricing being higher than the rest of the world is a big problem. I haven't seen anybody propose an effective solution yet. If the US simply stated that they wouldn't pay more than Europe then drug companies would probably just lower the prices 5% in the US and raise them 500% everywhere else. Then some countries would do compulsive licensing and drug prices in the US would still be far higher than elsewhere. Companies won't develop drugs if they can only sell them at marginal cost plus 5%.
The only real solution to the cost disparity problem that I see is to just publicly fund drug development soup to nuts. Right now we fund basic research - sometimes it comes up with candidate molecules and sometimes those candidates even work out (very rarely), but we don't publicly fund drug development (the part where you bribe tens of thousands of doctors to give their patient something that might help them). Actually, a single payer healthcare system would help drive down those costs considerably since you wouldn't need to pay a premium (the government would decide what drugs get top priority and they would be pushed out to the medical community as part of their jobs, and companies wouldn't be trying to out-bid each other to get patients enrolled). The sad thing about the clinical trial system is that patient benefit only happens almost accidentally as everybody else is basically just trying to make as much money as they can and the incentives are only loosely tied to making people better.
I will agree that the whole system needs a major overhaul. The solutions just aren't as easy as some make it out to be (price controls are just a band-aid in my opinion - one that won't really work).
There's plenty else you can do. It could glide out into deep water, or do a nose dive at terminal velocity into the ground, or contain self-destruct mechanisms.
Now, maybe there really isn't anything that interesting inside, so nobody cares. But, if you did care the last thing you'd try to do is a soft landing in the desert.
So tell me this: a group of foolish fourteen year olds get a tool from their father's, cut the fence and approach the building. What do you do? Snipe them?
Suppose a foolish fourteen year old decides to blindfold himself and run into traffic? They end up injured or dead. Fourteen year olds understand this, which is why they don't do it. If tales were circulating the local middle school about the kid who was killed last year for climbing the fence then chances are nobody else would try it.
Kids have a remarkable ability to avoid death (usually). That's why most of us are still here.
You *need* some sort of obstacle that only someone with the intent of doing real damage can overcome it, so that you can approach anyone who does as a real threat. Otherwise the potential for collateral damage is too great.
Propose such an obstacle. You suggested a wall - but fourteen year olds can steal ladders and climb walls.
I'm fine with having some kind of perimeter so that blind people don't inadvertently walk into the minefield or whatever. However, I really don't see much value in coddling people out to make trouble. You can protest on wall street all you want (and I'd even let you do it ON wall street and perhaps join you), but if you want to sneak into a reactor or missile silo or whatever then you become an example to the next person who wants to try it.
You can spend a ton of money idiot-proofing something, and then somebody else will just come along and build a better idiot.
My understanding is that both in the case of printer cartridges and the Nintendo Gameboy courts have upheld even the copying and display of a logo if it was required to ensure compatibility.
In the latter case every cartridge had to contain code to make the Nintendo logo scroll up the screen. That code was actually then run. However, the cartridge wouldn't run if it wasn't present. So, to make the cartridge work you had to do what on its face would brazenly violate trademark law. The courts ruled that anybody can use the Nintendo logo in this fashion now and Nintendo can't do anything about it, since they set up the system that required it.
Of course, nothing fixes the fact that you still can get sued for just about anything and be forced to defend yourself in court no matter how much you are in the right.
Why have those accounts all follow each other? It would make exterminating them trivial assuming twitter can be bothered to do so. Just implement any communications on the back end, or using less-obvious forms of communications.
Of course, with all the twitter spam out there it wouldn't surprise me if people just have these networks ready to go all the time and sell them to the highest bidder when the price gets high enough.
Yup. Even if the prosecutor did it just to get back at you for sleeping with his wife good luck getting anywhere with it. Google prosecutorial immunity...
I think he was being sarcastic and framing it from their view.
Seize $5k worth of computers and return $100 worth of depreciated hardware two years later. What harm has been done? Maybe you can find somebody else who would be willing to charge you $100 for a replacement server today and take it back for $5k two years later.:)
How do you make a wall that requires the use of explosives to scale? Or, is there some minimum amount of fuss that you need to make somebody go through before suddenly protesters will have no qualms with being shot?
Why not just have a simple fence with big signs saying "yes, we see you standing here, and as soon as we see you standing on the other side of this fence we'll pull the triggers on the guns already pointed at you?"
Or, better still, "Danger - minefield."
There will always be something more that could have been done to prevent people from being shot by security forces. The problem becomes how much money do you want to spend extending the life expectancy of troublemakers?
Fair point - that actually is the MO for just about everybody these days. If you run a big desktop environment you ignore feature requests because you know what you're doing better than they do. If you run an even bigger linux distro you just create your own desktop environment and stop using the mainstream one because you know what you're doing better than they do. Why cooperate when you can just fork?
Well, the end of the cone containing the earth is about 0.5au in radius.
That is an approximation I think - I'd have to work out whether you can really treat the surface of a sphere like a circle since it obviously isn't one.
Fortunately that last bit has never been upheld in court. That doesn't mean that they can't sue you just the same and make you litigate it until your'e broke. In the US you can sue anybody for anything - full stop.
When you buy a hard drive, you are generally buying the actual hard drive. But when you buy software, you aren't usually buying the software, but rather a license to use the software
No, you're buying the software. Copyright law might restrict what you can do with it, but you own it fair and square. I give you cash, you give me a box - you just sold me something.
Software companies would of course disagree vehemently with me, but their opinions don't really matter. What matters is the law - and I don't see any law that establishes this kind of legal framework. The closest you'll get is contract law, but I don't see any meeting of the minds here either - if I'm not able to negotiate the content of a contract then it isn't binding.
Now, courts have tended to take a middle view, allowing software to be treated as being licensed in some cases. Ultimately this is what governs whether you end up in jail or not. I can still say that they're wrong though - and at least at present they won't arrest me simply for that.:)
A nuclear plant is a big thing. Unless you establish a huge perimeter and monitor it then it is going to be hard to station enough people to overcome a significant number of attackers without the use of lethal force.
Snipers have the advantage of being able to delay or stop a much larger force while alerting the plant and not being at much risk of counter-attack.
Random guard patrols require a lot more people to cover the same area as a guy in a tower, and if one or two guards run into 15 intruders (possibly armed), those guards could be overpowered if they just engage them. A sniper can fire without much risk of counter-attack unless the intruders have fairly heavy weaponry.
Nuclear power plants are serious business - while I agree that law enforcement should show restraint we're not talking about a few vandals breaking into a shopping mall. A sniper might only have 100 yards before an intruder can break inside a building and be harder to reach, and once somebody is inside it only takes a little explosive in the right place to create big problems. Unless the exterior doors are designed to resist breaching it wouldn't take long for somebody determined to get inside - presumably they're carrying explosives to do damage to the interior, so sticking a bomb on a door isn't a big deal.
Plant memo --------------- To: Members of Alien Infestation From: Head of Plant Safety
Subject: Heat Exchangers
It has come to our attention that your tendency to pop out of walls, ceilings, and floors when attacking and inhabiting security forces is causing soldiers to open fire without taking the time to consult with the engineering team about the appropriateness of their backstops.
Henceforth all aliens are required to carry a 2" steel plate with them at all times, and to keep themselves situated between the plate and any armed soldiers in the area. Furthermore it is recommended that aliens file a form ATK-387 one week before staging any raids on armed groups to allow for a proper engineering impact assessment to be performed. Aliens will be directed to safe areas from which to wreak havoc on security forces while keeping firing arcs well away from sensitive plant equipment. We wouldn't want the wrong people to be killed, and more importantly this plant represents a serious capital investment on the part of our company, and we can't just have grunts triggering nuclear explosions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd go a step further and pay them whatever a public defender would be getting - if not their own normal wages plus 20%, with an additional compensation to their employer for the deprivation of their contributions.
Sure, it would cost money, but it would probably suddenly give everybody incentive to actually be on a jury and attentive to the case.
The judge and lawyers are essential to the process of justice, and yet for whatever reason they don't have to do it for $5/day.
We might want to note that the reason the payments are crazy figures like $5/day is that they were probably codified into law at a time when that actually was a significant compensation (you know, back when bread and milk cost a few pennies despite farms requiring 50% of the population to keep them running).
Well, the only difference today is that it can actually happen while in the box. Jurors used to talk about trials all the time - there is just no way to prove it.
At work when we implement electronic systems we often find ourselves detecting violations of process (sometimes with legal ramifications). Obviously these get addressed, but often the debate comes up over whether the electronic system is causing the problems. Usually the conclusion ends up being that most likely the problem had always existed, but the electronic system made it detectable.
As information becomes more and more available we'll find that almost everybody is a criminal by legal standards, and that almost everybody does stuff that most people would find distasteful. So, we can either punish ourselves collectively, or we can learn to adjust our standards to what has always been reality.
I don't think the important question is whether jurors have preconceptions, or if they talk to others about a case. I think the important question is whether in the end they are willing to look at the totality of the evidence and come to an honest conclusion about it. The problem is that the former tends to be easier to measure than the latter, and so that is what people tend to go after. It might change when it becomes impossible to run a trial to completion without putting half the jury pool in jail.
You say that like the judge and lawyers aren't walking around with cell phones, and as if they never lose attention during rambling testimony after lunch.
People are just complicated machines. They're machines that simply aren't designed to sit in a box and stare with razor-sharp attention at somebody else sitting in a box going on and on about something. The design of modern trials is about convenience and efficiency for the court - not effectiveness.
When you use a machine to do something that it isn't designed to do, then sometimes it doesn't do the job the way you want it to. Complaining about that won't change it (much). You'll get further by recognizing the flaws of humans and then working within those constraints.
I don't see any issue with allowing the use of calculators - if I had to multiple by a number like 29 I'd grab one or punch it into Google. Would I be unable to do so if trapped on an island - of course not. However, not using a calculator is a waste of time and greatly increases the opportunity for error.
Of course, just order-of-magnitude usually lets you solve problems like this on a multiple choice test. Actually, in the case of how many days until the cash runs out, you could deduce the answer from the wording of the choices even if the numbers in the question were obscured (but not the numbers in the answer choices). Of course, anybody able to reason that out logically probably would have no problem at all with just doing the math.
If I saw a teenage boy taking about visibility on MRI and Photoacoustic imaging my first assumption would be that they had help. This is graduate-level stuff. In fact, before even reading your post I had read the summaries of the other award-winners and that was my impression in all cases.
This just isn't science-fair stuff.
From experience with my kids and school projects 95% of them are tests of parental ability and willingness to spend time on the project. It is rare to see a middle school student handed a project they can actually complete based on skills and knowledge obtained at school. Of course parents should be involved at some level, but I've seen many projects that simply required the parent to basically do the whole thing and just explain to the kid what was going on the whole time. Either that, or let the kid give it his best shot and end up at the bottom of the pile. Just another arms race...
Yup - the real advantage in our society is being able to get picked. This seems a lot like the selection process that takes place at the animal shelter - the selective advantage is not based on survivability, but the ability to get picked by a good benefactor.
Sure, you get the odd case of individual achievement, but in many cases those who are ahead were chosen to be such.
They aren't meant to be attractive to men. They're meant to portray what women think that men want them to be. Men don't like bones, but women think they do, so they're more likely to buy something that they think will make them more boney.
Half the stuff women do to make themselves more attractive is based on mis-conceptions...
Women don't buy clothes to look like themselves wearing those clothes. They buy clothes to look like the model. Sure, they don't consciously think that way, but they do.
When Toyota publishes an annual statement do you think they get a picture of a bunch of sweaty guys working on their lines? No, they bring in a few models off-hours and dress them in uniforms and pose them.
When the local church puts some clip-art on their bulletins they don't take pictures of ordinary-looking people standing around in the lobby or whatever. They find some picture of a 22-year-old attractive couple holding a coffee chatting with another 22-year-old attractive couple. One couple will definitely be white, and the other will definitely be a minority of some sort. You'll never see an implied inter-racial couple or anything "dirty" like that. And, you definitely won't see fat people anywhere in sight.
Face it, people are superficial, and everybody doing marketing knows it...
Well, finally we need to reproduce the myth itself. We're wondering if replacing the batteries with C4 and using a blasting cap to trigger a detonation will cause an explosion. Better test that!
Wow, look, loading something up with explosives and setting them off does in deed blow it up. Science moves on!
Now, I do not really like to be a cynic, but I just cannot imagine that big pharma will put up the money to actually cure something. There just is not the same profit margin as there is for treatments.
In the short term the profits are still there.
Why is it that conspiracy theorists all think that no company is capable of thinking beyond the end of the current quarter, except for Pharmaceutical companies which are all unified in this 30-year plan to milk as much money out of health care as possible and they'll resist any 5-year huge surge in profits so that the next 5 CEOs in line after them can have a 10% higher rate of return and they can have mediocre performance?
Companies still research vaccines, which are as close to cures as we can come today. Granted, not many do it, for the reasons you state. However, if somebody came up with the cure for cancer no CEO would say "no, I don't want to make $50B more dollars in the next 5 years and $500M in bonuses because then after I retire the company might go downhill." They're quite content to send the company downhill to squeeze an extra $50M on the bottom line.
Who performed the clinical trials?
Just because a compound was licensed doesn't mean that it is without development cost. In fact, the main reason that companies license out their drugs in the first place is to avoid these development costs (I'm talking about licensing in R&D - not sales partnerships which happen in all industries and generally have different drivers).
Drug companies pay tons of money to license compounds that don't work out and don't make a dime. When they do work out they need to recoup the investment for both the successful and failed drugs. And the costs either way are very large - the phase 2/3 clinical trials are the biggest costs in the whole development process and usually compounds are licensed before they reach this stage (or the licensing costs end up being gargantuan).
I agree that US pricing being higher than the rest of the world is a big problem. I haven't seen anybody propose an effective solution yet. If the US simply stated that they wouldn't pay more than Europe then drug companies would probably just lower the prices 5% in the US and raise them 500% everywhere else. Then some countries would do compulsive licensing and drug prices in the US would still be far higher than elsewhere. Companies won't develop drugs if they can only sell them at marginal cost plus 5%.
The only real solution to the cost disparity problem that I see is to just publicly fund drug development soup to nuts. Right now we fund basic research - sometimes it comes up with candidate molecules and sometimes those candidates even work out (very rarely), but we don't publicly fund drug development (the part where you bribe tens of thousands of doctors to give their patient something that might help them). Actually, a single payer healthcare system would help drive down those costs considerably since you wouldn't need to pay a premium (the government would decide what drugs get top priority and they would be pushed out to the medical community as part of their jobs, and companies wouldn't be trying to out-bid each other to get patients enrolled). The sad thing about the clinical trial system is that patient benefit only happens almost accidentally as everybody else is basically just trying to make as much money as they can and the incentives are only loosely tied to making people better.
I will agree that the whole system needs a major overhaul. The solutions just aren't as easy as some make it out to be (price controls are just a band-aid in my opinion - one that won't really work).
There's plenty else you can do. It could glide out into deep water, or do a nose dive at terminal velocity into the ground, or contain self-destruct mechanisms.
Now, maybe there really isn't anything that interesting inside, so nobody cares. But, if you did care the last thing you'd try to do is a soft landing in the desert.
So tell me this: a group of foolish fourteen year olds get a tool from their father's, cut the fence and approach the building. What do you do? Snipe them?
Suppose a foolish fourteen year old decides to blindfold himself and run into traffic? They end up injured or dead. Fourteen year olds understand this, which is why they don't do it. If tales were circulating the local middle school about the kid who was killed last year for climbing the fence then chances are nobody else would try it.
Kids have a remarkable ability to avoid death (usually). That's why most of us are still here.
You *need* some sort of obstacle that only someone with the intent of doing real damage can overcome it, so that you can approach anyone who does as a real threat. Otherwise the potential for collateral damage is too great.
Propose such an obstacle. You suggested a wall - but fourteen year olds can steal ladders and climb walls.
I'm fine with having some kind of perimeter so that blind people don't inadvertently walk into the minefield or whatever. However, I really don't see much value in coddling people out to make trouble. You can protest on wall street all you want (and I'd even let you do it ON wall street and perhaps join you), but if you want to sneak into a reactor or missile silo or whatever then you become an example to the next person who wants to try it.
You can spend a ton of money idiot-proofing something, and then somebody else will just come along and build a better idiot.
My understanding is that both in the case of printer cartridges and the Nintendo Gameboy courts have upheld even the copying and display of a logo if it was required to ensure compatibility.
In the latter case every cartridge had to contain code to make the Nintendo logo scroll up the screen. That code was actually then run. However, the cartridge wouldn't run if it wasn't present. So, to make the cartridge work you had to do what on its face would brazenly violate trademark law. The courts ruled that anybody can use the Nintendo logo in this fashion now and Nintendo can't do anything about it, since they set up the system that required it.
Of course, nothing fixes the fact that you still can get sued for just about anything and be forced to defend yourself in court no matter how much you are in the right.
Why have those accounts all follow each other? It would make exterminating them trivial assuming twitter can be bothered to do so. Just implement any communications on the back end, or using less-obvious forms of communications.
Of course, with all the twitter spam out there it wouldn't surprise me if people just have these networks ready to go all the time and sell them to the highest bidder when the price gets high enough.
Twitter is obsolete in any case.
Yup. Even if the prosecutor did it just to get back at you for sleeping with his wife good luck getting anywhere with it. Google prosecutorial immunity...
I think he was being sarcastic and framing it from their view.
Seize $5k worth of computers and return $100 worth of depreciated hardware two years later. What harm has been done? Maybe you can find somebody else who would be willing to charge you $100 for a replacement server today and take it back for $5k two years later. :)
I'm not ashamed to call myself a Christian either, and I can't really disagree...
How do you make a wall that requires the use of explosives to scale? Or, is there some minimum amount of fuss that you need to make somebody go through before suddenly protesters will have no qualms with being shot?
Why not just have a simple fence with big signs saying "yes, we see you standing here, and as soon as we see you standing on the other side of this fence we'll pull the triggers on the guns already pointed at you?"
Or, better still, "Danger - minefield."
There will always be something more that could have been done to prevent people from being shot by security forces. The problem becomes how much money do you want to spend extending the life expectancy of troublemakers?
Fair point - that actually is the MO for just about everybody these days. If you run a big desktop environment you ignore feature requests because you know what you're doing better than they do. If you run an even bigger linux distro you just create your own desktop environment and stop using the mainstream one because you know what you're doing better than they do. Why cooperate when you can just fork?
Well, the end of the cone containing the earth is about 0.5au in radius.
That is an approximation I think - I'd have to work out whether you can really treat the surface of a sphere like a circle since it obviously isn't one.
Fortunately that last bit has never been upheld in court. That doesn't mean that they can't sue you just the same and make you litigate it until your'e broke. In the US you can sue anybody for anything - full stop.
When you buy a hard drive, you are generally buying the actual hard drive. But when you buy software, you aren't usually buying the software, but rather a license to use the software
No, you're buying the software. Copyright law might restrict what you can do with it, but you own it fair and square. I give you cash, you give me a box - you just sold me something.
Software companies would of course disagree vehemently with me, but their opinions don't really matter. What matters is the law - and I don't see any law that establishes this kind of legal framework. The closest you'll get is contract law, but I don't see any meeting of the minds here either - if I'm not able to negotiate the content of a contract then it isn't binding.
Now, courts have tended to take a middle view, allowing software to be treated as being licensed in some cases. Ultimately this is what governs whether you end up in jail or not. I can still say that they're wrong though - and at least at present they won't arrest me simply for that. :)
A nuclear plant is a big thing. Unless you establish a huge perimeter and monitor it then it is going to be hard to station enough people to overcome a significant number of attackers without the use of lethal force.
Snipers have the advantage of being able to delay or stop a much larger force while alerting the plant and not being at much risk of counter-attack.
Random guard patrols require a lot more people to cover the same area as a guy in a tower, and if one or two guards run into 15 intruders (possibly armed), those guards could be overpowered if they just engage them. A sniper can fire without much risk of counter-attack unless the intruders have fairly heavy weaponry.
Nuclear power plants are serious business - while I agree that law enforcement should show restraint we're not talking about a few vandals breaking into a shopping mall. A sniper might only have 100 yards before an intruder can break inside a building and be harder to reach, and once somebody is inside it only takes a little explosive in the right place to create big problems. Unless the exterior doors are designed to resist breaching it wouldn't take long for somebody determined to get inside - presumably they're carrying explosives to do damage to the interior, so sticking a bomb on a door isn't a big deal.
Plant memo
---------------
To: Members of Alien Infestation
From: Head of Plant Safety
Subject: Heat Exchangers
It has come to our attention that your tendency to pop out of walls, ceilings, and floors when attacking and inhabiting security forces is causing soldiers to open fire without taking the time to consult with the engineering team about the appropriateness of their backstops.
Henceforth all aliens are required to carry a 2" steel plate with them at all times, and to keep themselves situated between the plate and any armed soldiers in the area. Furthermore it is recommended that aliens file a form ATK-387 one week before staging any raids on armed groups to allow for a proper engineering impact assessment to be performed. Aliens will be directed to safe areas from which to wreak havoc on security forces while keeping firing arcs well away from sensitive plant equipment. We wouldn't want the wrong people to be killed, and more importantly this plant represents a serious capital investment on the part of our company, and we can't just have grunts triggering nuclear explosions.