missed this in your reply...I wanted to comment on it:
ing at stuff. You can be quick to shoot and more likely than not you'll make the evening news killing some teens playing a prank. Cue the pacifists, the anti-nuke protesters, the anti-military groups, and every other bleeding heart group out there for a PR debacle in progress. Or you don't shoot on sight and you end up with nuns, gardeners, and what-have-you painting bible verses on your walls. Personally, I'd rather have a red face for the activists showing off than have to live with killing civilians by mistake.
You have a tough job, I empathize. BUT, even being left leaning type myself, I want you to shoot and kill anyone who crosses the fences.
See, I understand that most people who you encounter are harmless, but you cannot, we cannot take that risk as a society. Nuclear weapon grade fuel is dangerous stuff, and it cannot fall into the wrong hands, period. If your security teams don't shoot to kill, but ask questions first, what happens when (not if, because it is going to happen - eventually given enough time) a hostile group attempts to enter the facility? It might make the difference between holding the place or not.
There will probably be some civilian casualties, but that is a cost we have to pay as a society to keep these weapons secure. We owe it to ourselves and the rest of the world to be responsible custodians of this power. And if that is a price that is too high to pay, then perhaps we need to evaluate poses sing these weapons in the first place.
Speaking as a former U.S. Marine *and* as a current contractor working in and around nuclear power facilities, I sincerely hope you're just joking. The idea that you consider Marines "trigger happy" is highly offensive.
I was just joking. The completely ridiculous statement about paying taxes to buy 'state of the fucking art tools for committing mass murder in the most efficient way possible' should have been a tip off.
The marines are tough, well disciplined troops who are really good at what they do. I said 'marines', and not army (typical for national defense installations), air force (since they control most of the delivery platforms), or national guard (The locals for the area) is because if you tell a marine to kill ANYONE who get within 100 years of the nuke fuel, he will do his job and he will do it well.
Why the explicit blame on "private security contractors"? Why not fire any private company who is not doing their job and find one that can/will?
Why is this being handled by private security at all? I pay taxes to give young, trigger happy marines the state of the fucking art tools for committing mass murder in the most efficient way possible. Why aren't there a ring of marines surrounding this place with orders to kill ANYTHING that doesn't come through the main gate with orders signed in triplicate?
Causation is a pretty fuzzy philosophical topic so arguing about what it is or isn't, is not terribly useful.
It seems pretty simple to me. Correlation is 'Sometimes A and B are found together'. Causation is 'A causes B'. But go on...
Maybe the best way to explain it to a liberal arts grad would be something like the journey is different than the destination
...I guess. So we are telling them that Correlation and Causation have close to the same meaning, got it. Like ham isn't bacon, and yet both are strangely delicious. Mmmmmm, pig meat...sorry, go on.
or when you come to a fork in the road and see the road less traveled correlation is how you know its less traveled,
Wait, what?
or that its all somehow symbolic of Hemmingways Old Man And The Sea and the act of fishing is much different than the expectations about getting a fish.
Is this stats 101, or literary criticism 204?
Either that or the point of Joyce's Ulysses wasn't a numerical analysis that people walked around a hell of a lot in Ireland a hundred years ago.
....I am getting more and more confused. Goddam Irish.
.. note to lib arts folks... that superior laughing feeling is what the STEM people experience when algebra dropouts try to swim in our sea of math...
STEM == Science Engineering Technology Math, I am guessing. For just a moment as I read that, I thought you were talking about some alien genetically engineered clones grown from stem cells, bent on subverting and destroying our society from with in. Too bad really, because it would have tied up the explanation nicely.
so when the smart guy says something about statistics, if the 1040EZ form baffles you and you can't find the "any" key on your keyboard, thats a good sign you should probably shut up and do what the smart guy says.
...And you win them over with your swauve, charming wit. SLAMDUNK!
Please promise me that you will never become a school teacher
I wonder if: the WH picks up a phone and calls somebody in the Chinese Embassy or straight to the right contact and says: yo, is this yours? Do you realize we interpret these things as an act of war?
US Diplomat: We have found out that there are attempts to gain access to US secure systems coming from Chinese controlled IP addresses. We take offense at this activity, and request that you cease immediately.
China Diplomat: The Peoples Republic abhor illegal and immoral activity, and in now way condone such behavior. While we are on the topic, we have discovered similar attacks on our systems coming from US controlled addresses.
US Diplomat: It is not the policy of the US to engage in clandestine cyber attacks on state controlled computer systems. We do not condone any such action.
China Diplomat: Excellent, we are in agreement then!
Of course. That was a point I made in my second paragraph. Now China can step up and help, offering some token gesture of cooperation, like extracting/forging logs pointing in some other direction.
This was a state acting, as cyber criminals likely don't care about nuclear delivery infrastructure. Assuming that I am a black hat in the official service of state intelligence attempting to compromise highly sensitive information, I am going to work through compromised foreign proxies ("I'm behind 7 proxies!"), burning one or more of them after each use, via drive wipes and deliberate infection with destructive viruses.
It seems weird that you would try something this daring directly from your home soil. It would be a great way to frame China for your misbehavior though, and throw the US off your scent.
Anyone else do a double take while reading summary?
"White House sources partly confirmed that U.S. government computers — reportedly including systems used by the military for nuclear commands — were breached by Chinese hackers."
Check. Got it.
"Nor had there been any attempted breach of a classified system, according to the official.'"
Chinese breach nuke system, no classified systems were breached, so nuke systems aren't classified....?
There are all these assumptions that we would have FTL, and be able to move at considerable fractions of FTL during battle.
BSG suggested that FTL drives needed considerable time to spin up (30+ mins), so their use in battle might similarly be limited depending on how they functionally work. ST:NG had the 'Piccard Maneuver', where short warp drive jumps were made. Numerous SF works have described torpedoes that have warp drives on them to hit an opponent at light speed. (The Berserker series, springs to mind with c+ weaponry).
There is no stealth. You need to dump your heat somewhere, else you cook.
There is plenty of Steath. 'Stealth' is just trying to give off less information for your opponent to collect. Perhaps you have a ship that will radiate heat from engines or life support. You minimize engine heat by getting going in a direction, and then killing the engines and coasting. A carrier with unmanned drones will be able to send out 'fighters' that have no energy required for life support, and coast through space only emitting heat generated by their computers operating at minimum levels. While you might be able to look at a star with a radar telescope and measure temperatures of stars thousands of light years away, doing so from a moving (inhabited) platform with time constraints and looking for hostile objects that put out relatively no heat (compared to a star) will be challenging. We have many telescopes on earth and we are still routinely surprised by asteroids that end up doing close passes.
I suspect that there will be considerable attempts at stealth, such that it look like submarine space carrier combat. A 'carrier' will be operating in a mode rather akin to a silent running, where the captain will try to generate very little waste heat and other EM noise, running along a course and only using engines to alter speed and heading when needed. A screen of drones will collect info and conduct weapon firing. Kinetic rounds will be launched like torpedoes, running quietly until they are forced to go active. You still can try to approach a foe with a star to your back to mask your heat signature. You might even run cold drones to 'optically' occlude your heat signature. The distances will greatly increase, but there will still be a need for stealth.
I always wanted an 'Unsafe search' option. If safe search removes all the pervy links from a search, I want a button that ONLY returns pervy results.
I really want to see what Google returns with 'unsafe search' turned on for truly boring and mundane words like 'Baseball', 'Database', or 'Tax return'. I bet you could find some pretty fucking weird sites with that feature....
China can out number us 10 to 1, but without the ability to project power with a blue water navy and air superiority, who cares? Give them all the guns in the world and if they are still limited to Eastern Asia it is basically meaningless. China will not invade Japan, because the US will get involved. They also will not invade Taiwan for the same reason. This is also why the US will not get involved in the Chinese occupation of Tibet.The tech edge isn't the only edge, they have a LOT of tech. China might be pouring money into its military, but they are probably decades behind the US in military tech and infrastructure and the US isn't standing still. As demonstrated in Kuwait and Iraq, superior numbers and dated tech do not win wars. Besides, China isn't interested in engaging in forign adventures, they have a HUGE population they need to keep happy. China has a tradition of violent insurrections overthrowing governments, and they are quite happy pretending to be 'communists' with a growing, rich middle class.
Also, nobody is scared of the US nuclear arsenal, because the US has made it abundantly clear that it is a deterrent tool. If you want to fight the US, you can do so without fear of nuclear retaliation, provided you don't engage in NBC warfare against them. Simply put, the political fallout over using nukes as anything other than a retaliation weapon would be catastrophic. As powerful as the US is, it cannot act against the will of the rest of the world.
Your comments on power are partially correct, If you refer to something solar or hydro-electric where the production is more determined by the environment than anything else. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of power generated by burning petrol chemicals, and cutting back on power consumption will result in less of these being used in the first place, before they are converted into something like electrical power. So conservation is a very good thing, actually.
She suggested that we try to write up a brief description of what we wanted and how much it would cost...
I don't understand why this story is tagged with git and svn then asks how much it will cost.
Amen bother. To Poster: Don't explain how much it will cost. Go get SVN, which is free and simple. GIT is more powerful, but sort of overkill if you are just two people within shouting distance. Don't bother trying to explain it to her, and use her offer to help with tools on a product that you can't get for free.
Mythbusters is pseudoscience at best. It's entertaining, which is its designed intent, but it galls me when Internet people hold it up as a paragon of scientific thought.
Its good for non-scientists to watch, because it promotes logical thought and encourages testing of ideas.
Unity can publish to: Web Player, Flash, iOS, Android, Desktop, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360. Torque3d is an engine that publishes for one platform. I could give a fuck what exotic flavor of *.nix that Torque gets ported to, it still doesn't publish to more than one platform without radical re-writes being done by the OS community which I don't see happening any time soon.
So, 'ported to Ubuntu' is not the same as supports publishing to Web Player, Flash, iOS, Android, Desktop, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, sorry.
Good point. Because the source code is available, Torque3D can be ported to both iOS and Android. And to any other platform anybody cares about. Thankyou for illustrating the power of open source.
Ported to isn't the same as supports. I believe that you can compile code using unity for multiple platforms. Who cares if torque gets ported to all sorts of esoteric *nix flavors? I want write games on one platform and compile for multiple platforms. That could be done, but I am not holding my breath.
This little straw man is always a fun one. Let me turn it around on you. If I knew for a fact that my child committed a crime that merited the death penalty, heck, even if I am the one who turned him in, I still wouldn't stand outside the prison with a sign that says, 'Fry the bastard.'
You still didn't answer the underlying question. Would you be willing to die for a murder you didn't commit?
I usually skip this argument, as it is so hard to prove conclusively what the effect is on the overall murder statistic. On one hand, there doesn't seem to be a substantial decrease in murders occurring as a result of capitol punishment. On the other, we don't really have any strong evidence that there isn't a very slight decrease as a small percentage of potential murders are deterred. It is clear that there isn't a huge impact, but the question then becomes something like, what is the decrease that is acceptable for the added costs incurred, financially and morally by using capitol punishment? Is saving 10 lives a year worth it?
I think this question is a lot less clear cut than you think, and you are correct I am deliberately choosing to ignore it. I agree with you, but it is much harder to honestly debate than the points I made.
Obviously as there are zero murders in any country that has the death penalty. Of course a law will stop anyone from doing anything illegal. Oh wait...
While I am in agreement with your point of view, this is a weak argument against the death penalty. You could also make the same claim about how prison sentences have not effectively deterred common theft to the point of non-occurrence, and therefore should be abolished. (Reductio ad absurdum argument)
I've mostly suggested streamlining the appeals process, eliminating some of the duplication of effort, and restricting the death penalty to the 'worst offenders'. We're not just talking 1st degree murder. My general standard is '3 or more killed, or deliberate torture in addition to the murder'. You don't try to sentence a 60 year old doctor who killed his wife by poison after catching her cheating to death. You go for the under 25 year old gangbanger 'executioner' who killed 6 people with his bare hands with that sentence. The second isn't containable in a minimum security prison, the first is.
The reason the death penalty is flat out wrong is quite simple. It isn't just that you are being hypocritical about the morality of killing, it is also that you are murdering innocent people.
In any group of convicted murderers, there are going to be some people who are innocent. That's just a fact. People (juries) make mistakes. So some number of people you put to death are going to be innocent. It might be one in a hundred or one in ten thousand, but they are going to be there regardless of your degree of diligence. And when 15 years later, when new evidence comes to light as it seems to with alarmingly frequency, you can't just let them out of jail with an apology.
Whenever I talk to pro-death penalty people, I ask them if they would still support the death penalty if they or one of their loved ones was one of those one in a thousand cases where an innocent person was wrongly convicted, I have yet to hear a convincing 'yes'. Are you so strong in your belief of the value of capitol punishment that you would be willing to die to support it? Would you stand outside the prison when your child was executed with a sign that says, 'Fry the bastard', when you knew they were only guilty of not having a good alibi and a good lawyer?
Slashdot Mirror
Please turn in your polyhedral dice and delete your /. account, you have just lost all your nerd points.
One thing is universal: everyone hates SOX.
And why not? Most thieves hate the Law....
missed this in your reply...I wanted to comment on it:
ing at stuff. You can be quick to shoot and more likely than not you'll make the evening news killing some teens playing a prank. Cue the pacifists, the anti-nuke protesters, the anti-military groups, and every other bleeding heart group out there for a PR debacle in progress. Or you don't shoot on sight and you end up with nuns, gardeners, and what-have-you painting bible verses on your walls. Personally, I'd rather have a red face for the activists showing off than have to live with killing civilians by mistake.
You have a tough job, I empathize. BUT, even being left leaning type myself, I want you to shoot and kill anyone who crosses the fences.
See, I understand that most people who you encounter are harmless, but you cannot, we cannot take that risk as a society. Nuclear weapon grade fuel is dangerous stuff, and it cannot fall into the wrong hands, period. If your security teams don't shoot to kill, but ask questions first, what happens when (not if, because it is going to happen - eventually given enough time) a hostile group attempts to enter the facility? It might make the difference between holding the place or not.
There will probably be some civilian casualties, but that is a cost we have to pay as a society to keep these weapons secure. We owe it to ourselves and the rest of the world to be responsible custodians of this power. And if that is a price that is too high to pay, then perhaps we need to evaluate poses sing these weapons in the first place.
Speaking as a former U.S. Marine *and* as a current contractor working in and around nuclear power facilities, I sincerely hope you're just joking. The idea that you consider Marines "trigger happy" is highly offensive.
I was just joking. The completely ridiculous statement about paying taxes to buy 'state of the fucking art tools for committing mass murder in the most efficient way possible' should have been a tip off.
The marines are tough, well disciplined troops who are really good at what they do. I said 'marines', and not army (typical for national defense installations), air force (since they control most of the delivery platforms), or national guard (The locals for the area) is because if you tell a marine to kill ANYONE who get within 100 years of the nuke fuel, he will do his job and he will do it well.
Why the explicit blame on "private security contractors"? Why not fire any private company who is not doing their job and find one that can/will?
Why is this being handled by private security at all? I pay taxes to give young, trigger happy marines the state of the fucking art tools for committing mass murder in the most efficient way possible. Why aren't there a ring of marines surrounding this place with orders to kill ANYTHING that doesn't come through the main gate with orders signed in triplicate?
Military weapon fuel, military security.
Causation is a pretty fuzzy philosophical topic so arguing about what it is or isn't, is not terribly useful.
...I guess. So we are telling them that Correlation and Causation have close to the same meaning, got it. Like ham isn't bacon, and yet both are strangely delicious. Mmmmmm, pig meat...sorry, go on.
....I am getting more and more confused. Goddam Irish.
.. note to lib arts folks... that superior laughing feeling is what the STEM people experience when algebra dropouts try to swim in our sea of math...
...And you win them over with your swauve, charming wit. SLAMDUNK!
It seems pretty simple to me. Correlation is 'Sometimes A and B are found together'. Causation is 'A causes B'. But go on...
Maybe the best way to explain it to a liberal arts grad would be something like the journey is different than the destination
or when you come to a fork in the road and see the road less traveled correlation is how you know its less traveled,
Wait, what?
or that its all somehow symbolic of Hemmingways Old Man And The Sea and the act of fishing is much different than the expectations about getting a fish.
Is this stats 101, or literary criticism 204?
Either that or the point of Joyce's Ulysses wasn't a numerical analysis that people walked around a hell of a lot in Ireland a hundred years ago.
STEM == Science Engineering Technology Math, I am guessing. For just a moment as I read that, I thought you were talking about some alien genetically engineered clones grown from stem cells, bent on subverting and destroying our society from with in. Too bad really, because it would have tied up the explanation nicely.
so when the smart guy says something about statistics, if the 1040EZ form baffles you and you can't find the "any" key on your keyboard, thats a good sign you should probably shut up and do what the smart guy says.
Please promise me that you will never become a school teacher
I wonder if: the WH picks up a phone and calls somebody in the Chinese Embassy or straight to the right contact and says: yo, is this yours? Do you realize we interpret these things as an act of war?
US Diplomat: We have found out that there are attempts to gain access to US secure systems coming from Chinese controlled IP addresses. We take offense at this activity, and request that you cease immediately.
....And both sides keep hacking.
China Diplomat: The Peoples Republic abhor illegal and immoral activity, and in now way condone such behavior. While we are on the topic, we have discovered similar attacks on our systems coming from US controlled addresses.
US Diplomat: It is not the policy of the US to engage in clandestine cyber attacks on state controlled computer systems. We do not condone any such action.
China Diplomat: Excellent, we are in agreement then!
Of course. That was a point I made in my second paragraph. Now China can step up and help, offering some token gesture of cooperation, like extracting/forging logs pointing in some other direction.
This was a state acting, as cyber criminals likely don't care about nuclear delivery infrastructure. Assuming that I am a black hat in the official service of state intelligence attempting to compromise highly sensitive information, I am going to work through compromised foreign proxies ("I'm behind 7 proxies!"), burning one or more of them after each use, via drive wipes and deliberate infection with destructive viruses.
It seems weird that you would try something this daring directly from your home soil. It would be a great way to frame China for your misbehavior though, and throw the US off your scent.
Anyone else do a double take while reading summary?
"White House sources partly confirmed that U.S. government computers — reportedly including systems used by the military for nuclear commands — were breached by Chinese hackers."
Check. Got it.
"Nor had there been any attempted breach of a classified system, according to the official.'"
Chinese breach nuke system, no classified systems were breached, so nuke systems aren't classified....?
There are all these assumptions that we would have FTL, and be able to move at considerable fractions of FTL during battle.
BSG suggested that FTL drives needed considerable time to spin up (30+ mins), so their use in battle might similarly be limited depending on how they functionally work. ST:NG had the 'Piccard Maneuver', where short warp drive jumps were made. Numerous SF works have described torpedoes that have warp drives on them to hit an opponent at light speed. (The Berserker series, springs to mind with c+ weaponry).
There is no stealth. You need to dump your heat somewhere, else you cook.
There is plenty of Steath. 'Stealth' is just trying to give off less information for your opponent to collect. Perhaps you have a ship that will radiate heat from engines or life support. You minimize engine heat by getting going in a direction, and then killing the engines and coasting. A carrier with unmanned drones will be able to send out 'fighters' that have no energy required for life support, and coast through space only emitting heat generated by their computers operating at minimum levels. While you might be able to look at a star with a radar telescope and measure temperatures of stars thousands of light years away, doing so from a moving (inhabited) platform with time constraints and looking for hostile objects that put out relatively no heat (compared to a star) will be challenging. We have many telescopes on earth and we are still routinely surprised by asteroids that end up doing close passes.
I suspect that there will be considerable attempts at stealth, such that it look like submarine space carrier combat. A 'carrier' will be operating in a mode rather akin to a silent running, where the captain will try to generate very little waste heat and other EM noise, running along a course and only using engines to alter speed and heading when needed. A screen of drones will collect info and conduct weapon firing. Kinetic rounds will be launched like torpedoes, running quietly until they are forced to go active. You still can try to approach a foe with a star to your back to mask your heat signature. You might even run cold drones to 'optically' occlude your heat signature. The distances will greatly increase, but there will still be a need for stealth.
I thought it was for the criminally bad acting and scripting of the movie.
If this was true, most of Hollywood would be arrested, and Michael Bay would be in GitMo solitary.
I always wanted an 'Unsafe search' option. If safe search removes all the pervy links from a search, I want a button that ONLY returns pervy results.
I really want to see what Google returns with 'unsafe search' turned on for truly boring and mundane words like 'Baseball', 'Database', or 'Tax return'. I bet you could find some pretty fucking weird sites with that feature....
China can out number us 10 to 1, but without the ability to project power with a blue water navy and air superiority, who cares? Give them all the guns in the world and if they are still limited to Eastern Asia it is basically meaningless. China will not invade Japan, because the US will get involved. They also will not invade Taiwan for the same reason. This is also why the US will not get involved in the Chinese occupation of Tibet.The tech edge isn't the only edge, they have a LOT of tech. China might be pouring money into its military, but they are probably decades behind the US in military tech and infrastructure and the US isn't standing still. As demonstrated in Kuwait and Iraq, superior numbers and dated tech do not win wars. Besides, China isn't interested in engaging in forign adventures, they have a HUGE population they need to keep happy. China has a tradition of violent insurrections overthrowing governments, and they are quite happy pretending to be 'communists' with a growing, rich middle class.
Also, nobody is scared of the US nuclear arsenal, because the US has made it abundantly clear that it is a deterrent tool. If you want to fight the US, you can do so without fear of nuclear retaliation, provided you don't engage in NBC warfare against them. Simply put, the political fallout over using nukes as anything other than a retaliation weapon would be catastrophic. As powerful as the US is, it cannot act against the will of the rest of the world.
All electric heaters are 100% efficient.
...And I counter with 'all engines are just heaters in disguise'! HA!
Say, could someone speed up time? The universe is a bit chilly today...
Your comments on power are partially correct, If you refer to something solar or hydro-electric where the production is more determined by the environment than anything else. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of power generated by burning petrol chemicals, and cutting back on power consumption will result in less of these being used in the first place, before they are converted into something like electrical power. So conservation is a very good thing, actually.
She suggested that we try to write up a brief description of what we wanted and how much it would cost ...
I don't understand why this story is tagged with git and svn then asks how much it will cost.
Amen bother. To Poster: Don't explain how much it will cost. Go get SVN, which is free and simple. GIT is more powerful, but sort of overkill if you are just two people within shouting distance. Don't bother trying to explain it to her, and use her offer to help with tools on a product that you can't get for free.
Mythbusters is pseudoscience at best. It's entertaining, which is its designed intent, but it galls me when Internet people hold it up as a paragon of scientific thought.
Its good for non-scientists to watch, because it promotes logical thought and encourages testing of ideas.
Unity can publish to: Web Player, Flash, iOS, Android, Desktop, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360. Torque3d is an engine that publishes for one platform. I could give a fuck what exotic flavor of *.nix that Torque gets ported to, it still doesn't publish to more than one platform without radical re-writes being done by the OS community which I don't see happening any time soon.
So, 'ported to Ubuntu' is not the same as supports publishing to Web Player, Flash, iOS, Android, Desktop, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, sorry.
Good point. Because the source code is available, Torque3D can be ported to both iOS and Android. And to any other platform anybody cares about. Thankyou for illustrating the power of open source.
Ported to isn't the same as supports. I believe that you can compile code using unity for multiple platforms. Who cares if torque gets ported to all sorts of esoteric *nix flavors? I want write games on one platform and compile for multiple platforms. That could be done, but I am not holding my breath.
This little straw man is always a fun one. Let me turn it around on you. If I knew for a fact that my child committed a crime that merited the death penalty, heck, even if I am the one who turned him in, I still wouldn't stand outside the prison with a sign that says, 'Fry the bastard.'
You still didn't answer the underlying question. Would you be willing to die for a murder you didn't commit?
I usually skip this argument, as it is so hard to prove conclusively what the effect is on the overall murder statistic. On one hand, there doesn't seem to be a substantial decrease in murders occurring as a result of capitol punishment. On the other, we don't really have any strong evidence that there isn't a very slight decrease as a small percentage of potential murders are deterred. It is clear that there isn't a huge impact, but the question then becomes something like, what is the decrease that is acceptable for the added costs incurred, financially and morally by using capitol punishment? Is saving 10 lives a year worth it?
I think this question is a lot less clear cut than you think, and you are correct I am deliberately choosing to ignore it. I agree with you, but it is much harder to honestly debate than the points I made.
Obviously as there are zero murders in any country that has the death penalty. Of course a law will stop anyone from doing anything illegal. Oh wait...
While I am in agreement with your point of view, this is a weak argument against the death penalty. You could also make the same claim about how prison sentences have not effectively deterred common theft to the point of non-occurrence, and therefore should be abolished. (Reductio ad absurdum argument)
I've mostly suggested streamlining the appeals process, eliminating some of the duplication of effort, and restricting the death penalty to the 'worst offenders'. We're not just talking 1st degree murder. My general standard is '3 or more killed, or deliberate torture in addition to the murder'. You don't try to sentence a 60 year old doctor who killed his wife by poison after catching her cheating to death. You go for the under 25 year old gangbanger 'executioner' who killed 6 people with his bare hands with that sentence. The second isn't containable in a minimum security prison, the first is.
The reason the death penalty is flat out wrong is quite simple. It isn't just that you are being hypocritical about the morality of killing, it is also that you are murdering innocent people.
In any group of convicted murderers, there are going to be some people who are innocent. That's just a fact. People (juries) make mistakes. So some number of people you put to death are going to be innocent. It might be one in a hundred or one in ten thousand, but they are going to be there regardless of your degree of diligence. And when 15 years later, when new evidence comes to light as it seems to with alarmingly frequency, you can't just let them out of jail with an apology.
Whenever I talk to pro-death penalty people, I ask them if they would still support the death penalty if they or one of their loved ones was one of those one in a thousand cases where an innocent person was wrongly convicted, I have yet to hear a convincing 'yes'. Are you so strong in your belief of the value of capitol punishment that you would be willing to die to support it? Would you stand outside the prison when your child was executed with a sign that says, 'Fry the bastard', when you knew they were only guilty of not having a good alibi and a good lawyer?
Algae?
Waterbears grown in a vat exposed to raw solar radiation in transit, collected and baked into a protein paste?
As long as you get rid of the notion of bigmacs and fries, and are willing to settle for "nutritious", things aren't so bad.
Cool, I already eat vegan so it's not even a stretch to subsist on a goopy nigh-inedible paste.
Branson, I'm in.
Oooh, sorry, I don't think you are. Tardigrades are technically animals, so you couldn't eat them if you are a vegan.