You don't understand... Steve was dying, and Google mocked him by making a hydra in the shape of his greatest brain child. That damned Android just wouldn't die, and the more heads Steve cut off, the more the damn thing would grow. He had to crush Google and its Gawd forsaken Android. He had no choice but to jettison every bit of Google from the AppleSphere. If it hurts Apple, so be it, Android must be obliterated or the space time continuum will shatter!
So clearly you must see it was a simple business decision.
Is there a correlation between vegetarianism and IOS adoption? Jobs had all the Buddhist mojo going on... in fact he tried to heal his cancer with his MIND... if he'd just gone and gotten regular therapy when he first discovered his illness, he'd almost certainly still be with us today... Om Mani Padme Hum...
Actually, in keeping with the whole Borg thought line, Balmer's head being lowered in to a Borg Queen body, only she's a pot bellied pig in a space suit... that would be fun... a bit inflammatory, but fun. The whole, we're going to beat the water with our over priced desktop software hoping to chase our customers into our subscription net only works if there's no place else to go. Looks like Google Apps is going to clean up. Poor Balmer, a penny shy and a day late... again.
As for Apple icon, you could do an Ant Hill with an Apple logo... you could do an ant farm, and have all the tunnels draw Steve Job's face... You could take a robot from "I Robot" and stencil iUser on its forehead. Just a few thoughts.
Sure there is, elect representatives who are clearly willing to create a constitutional amendment separating corporation and state. Return corporations to a sane level of power and wealth. Design them such that they can have great size, but the larger they are, the more limited their social strength, so they can't use their size to hijack the social process. Tax all corporations at a fix rate of 18% with no loopholes. Make any political representative found to be taking money from corporations ground for instant censure and removal from legislative body, you want to make it really hurt, require the representatives replacement come from the opposite party (that way you get help to stay on the wagon, as it were.) You can build all kinds of checks and balances into the system. It just takes the people of this nation getting a clue then getting off their fat collective asses.
Everyone here seems to be adding their own opinions none of which are suggested or demonstrated in the article. The basis for the conversation is that the green revolution should have made it possible for us to increase the green biomass. What we're seeing is that the green we grow is offset by wild green that grows less and the total green biomass remains constant. This isn't to say it will remain constant for any arbitrary length of time.
So this tells us we can grow one 2500 sequoia, or a similar mass of corn or wheat or soybeans in any given year. We also know that the tropical forests are under assault and because the wealth if tropical forests tend to be in their canopy and not their soul, a cleared area results in erosion and growing desertification. It will be interesting to see in 10 years when we can begin to see what the legacy of slash and burn forest clearing is doing to the Tropical places on earth. Add to that heat stress and drought and we will be seeing new and interesting changes.
The problem is that there were a number of case of extraordinary rendition where innocent people were kidnapped by the U.S. Government, taken to the middle east where they were tortured then eventually dumped someplace else or in some cases died of the torture process. One of the more popular cases was that of Maher Arar, a Canadian telecommunications engineer with dual citizenship in Canada and Syria whose only mistake was landing in the U.S. for a flight layover on his way back home. What followed would have made a great situation comedy if torture hadn't been involved. The U.S. is stonewalling these cases to this day. There are so many horror stories the case of Aafia Siddiqui is so terrible, it made me nauseous reading it. I think the person the GP may be speaking of was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment. He was a University Professor (and was himself an immigrant from the Middle East) at a major school in New England and had posted flyer to get students together to discuss what the Government was doing and whether it served our culture to abandon the Geneva Convention. The result is that he himself was kidnapped and in an act of extraordinary rendition spent the next 18 months as a guest of the U.S. Government seeing a number of fascinating torture facilities in the middle east. His abuse was severe and the damage to his body and his mind permanent. Eventually he was dumped naked and found his way to Canada where he and his family now live. The US claims no knowledge of what happened to him.
There's a great book about rendition by a former CIA agent, and what he says basically is that the people who pushed this insanity through knew nothing about interrogation or intelligence, and that their choice to ignore the Geneva Convention damaged us far more than any attack from the outside ever could.
Listening to the sides I'm left with an overwhelming feeling that someone (whose project starts with an 'X'), got lazy, took short cuts, rationalized a whole bunch of cheesy decisions as within the spirit of Open Source, if not in fact by the letter. This is a cautionary tale of how people find themselves in a tight spot by cutting corners. You start with 100% integrity and everything is plugging along like gangbusters. But its a lotta work, and you're a busy guy, so you shave a few points, because hell, who's gonna notice. So now you're running at 96%, but that's still great, you're playing with way more integrity than a lot of guys out there and you're proud that for the most part your work is solid. Only that 96%, becomes your new 100%, and before long, you figure hell it worked fine last time so I'll shave a few more points and cut a few more corners. Before long you running at 7% integrity, nothing is happening when you say it will, or if it does its because you lied, cheated and stole to do it. Worse when someone confronts what a sleaze you've been, you have to demonize them. because you've built this who complicated rational to justify all the cheesy crap you've been pulling.
By the way, any one of us could get all preachy, but this behavior is as human as squirting our young'ns. Common as dirt. So, at one level, our intrepid slacker can say, hey, everyone else is doing it, and he's pretty much right. Only its why things suck in the world. No integrity. Not even like integrity as a moral state, but simple integrity like functional, complete, workable. Our political leaders, corporations, school administrators, dedicatedly self devoted are all cutting corners. Pointing fingers and exclaiming, well I'm not as bad as he or she is, and only a tight-ass would care anyway, right?
Being a person of integrity is like being pregnant. You are or you aren't. Do whatever little monkey dance you want to camouflage your behavior to high heaven, what you did was cheesy, then you tried to cover it up, then you tried to work around it, and finally you white washed it with jailhouse lawyering, and still, not a bit of it washes, not a bit of comes clean. The answer is you stop and begin doing the right thing. You honor the GPL. You acknowledge the code author. You share your source. You do it straight by the numbers. Or you don't, but don't try to justify yourself, just be honest and admit you're lazy and a little bit larcenous. There are worse things. Right?
In western culture we have this strange idea of what it means to forgive. So forgiving doesn't mean agreeing with, condoning, or promoting what another has done in any way. It does mean giving up the right to hold resentment or to punish. Forgiving is something a person does or a society can do. In the case of those who commit great atrocities it is perfectly reasonable for individuals to forgive, while society demands some form of retribution. Did you see dead man walking. The Susan Sarandon character was a perfect example of personal forgiveness. You do not forgive to release the guilty, you forgive to liberate the innocent.
Let me put this another way. Do you think for a moment this guilty person cares a wit what you think or how you feel. So you can choose to bear the burden of toxic emotions, or you can choose to divest yourself of hatred (even where deserved) so that your soul is liberated from darkness. A wise man once said vengeance is poison you swallow hoping the other person will die.
Actually the trials themselves are so much more expensive that they alone would make the the simple life without parole a profoundly less expensive proposition. Murder trial cost millions of dollars. The trials are by design harder to prosecute, therefore huge resources are brought to bear to ensure a desired outcome, and that makes these trial huge ticket items that has been so expensive that a number of states are looking to end the death penalty as a simple cost cutting measure.
The very problem you pose is that this person commits such a heinous act that you want to return the act in kind, letting him lower you to the same level. I realize its a profound human desire to sweep the earth clean of such a walking atrocity, but you must work to maintain your own soul, and dignity when facing such evil. So you do a far site more than simply house this animal for the next 50 years. You can make him work to make restitution. You can show him to your children and your children's children. This is what a monster looks like. He put his beliefs above the lives and futures of 77 good and decent people. This is what we do with monsters. We put them in tiny holes and night and we work them like dogs during the day, and squeeze a little good out this horrible pile of reeking bad. We come up with new and exciting ways to use this scum. Perhaps in 20 years he finds God and has a change or heart, or not. We give him every opportunity to transform and we use that as a lesson too. How we take the worst human toxic waste and in the end mine it for some human dignity. This is about the possibility of healing, and that always begins with an act of forgiving, not to let the monster off the hook, but to let yourself off the hook.
I am way anti-death penalty, but you don't know what you're taking about here. Nitrogen Narcosis is perhaps one of the nicest ways to cash in your chips available to human kind, you go out giddy, happy, painless as hell... then lights out sweet prince. It's the build up of CO2 that causes all the nasty things you're describing. CO2 in the blood causes acidosis and over about 12% becomes a real horror to be any part of. You breath pure N2, and you excrete your CO2 just like normal, just no O2 to sustain the metabolic machinery. Real quick you go bye bye. In fact a number of states looked at N2 as a humane death penalty and most decided no, because the prisoners died with blissful smiles and they wanted them to suffer a little for the benefit of the victims witnessing.
In fact in recent years with the shortage of prison space (the ongoing disaster that is our war on drugs), and the growing epidemic of crime fueled by drugs (primarily street gangs), prisons have become part of a plea bargain revolving door merry-go-round. People get sand bagged, prosecutors throw the book at you, heaping felony after felony until you're looking at a potential prison term that looks like the half life of the universe. Then they throw you a sweet deal to be out is no time at all, and even if you're innocent, you can't afford to pass it up, because if you lose you go away until hell freezes over. So now we have innocents in prison and monsters who get out in no time at all to help process the mess that is out legal justice system.
A high standard of juris prudence would begin by making certain that Prosecutors weren't using their office as a political spring board and that their measure for success included how many innocent people they let go as well as how many bad guys they put in jail. Getting it right should trump being hard on crime. We should punish prosecutors who are as hard on innocence as they are on crime.
New technologies promise to give us the ability to virtually read minds in the near future. Witnesses are horrible, every study proves that people are terrible at remembering traumatic events accurately. Your biological memories don't lie. When we can see your memory, we'll get the truth and you will be either innocent or guilty. You still have the right not to self incriminate, but then you have to live with evidence at trial, and jurors think pleading the fifth is just another way of saying you caught me red handed. I look forward to far fewer bogus convictions.
Wow... I'm not even sure where to start with this. Since 1970 over 140 people have been liberated from death row through the later discovery of irrefutable evidence of their innocence. The problem has never been juries. The problem is with Prosecuting Attorneys who've committed morally reprehensible acts to win cases at any cost including the cost of sending innocent people to death row. It happens, there is a rich body of evidence to prove it. So your presumption of guilt is at best a pipe-dream.
We know innocent people get executed. One was just executed in Texas earlier this year and knowing the man was almost certainly innocent, Governor Perry let him meet his maker. That's our justice system. Its wimpy to let someone off of death row, we kill people. The whole point is that there are countless people doing the time who didn't do the crime. Our criminal justice system is flat busted. Really, its all broke up. Innocent people all over the place taking pleas to avoid spending draconian sentences in prison. Guilty monsters that need to be locked up forever, doing almost no time in a revolving door legal system. That by definition is broken.
I agree prosecute the squeal right out of the little piggies from Wall Street... maybe taking away their wealth, privilege and their beliefs that they're above the laws of the land would be make them excellent examples to those who might follow in their footsteps. Making Sausage of them seems a wee bit extreme. Let the punishment fit the crime. Have them spend the rest of their lives doing house work at homeless shelters. Make a contribution to society as well as teach them a little humility. Executing them sound a little French Revolution for my taste (remember a lot of good people were killed during the French Revolution for no more reason than their powdered wig was a wee bit too nice.
Again this absolute certainly without even a popcorn fart of evidence to back it up. Murder for the most part is an act of hot blood. Its a passionate thing based on fear or anger or jealousy or revenge. The part of the brain at work isn't making careful plans. This is an idiot and his homies gunning down a competing gang member in retaliation for an earlier drive by and as a byproduct they also gun down a half dozen innocent bystanders.
If you think for a moment they give a second thought to death penalty. These are guys dealing in day to day life threatening violence, the idea that an event 20 years away would have any weight in the way they think is simply ludicrous. Perhaps the death penalty deters homicidal actuaries, or vengeful logicians, but the rest of society is pretty much unable to make plans long term enough to include the consequences of managing 10 pounds let alone how their lives would be impacted by a death sentence.
People don't kill because its wrong. People who do kill, do so because their ability to manage their emotional state has been exceeded and therefore making logical choices is no longer possible. For the serial killers, and sociopaths, and psychopaths, you want to execute them, I don't agree, but if you can prove them guilty with absolute certainty, then I guess those special cases might be an exception. I'm just saying as long as the current system is so deeply buggered you advocate serious darkness without much solid logical ground to stand on.
Stop arguing the point on intangibles and deal with the facts. Since 1970 over 10% of the people on death row have been released upon discovery of their innocence through recent advances like DNA. That would suggest we've been killing innocent people for a long time and there is in fact excellent evidence to support that finding. That's not some fly in the ointment, that a full blown failure of the system. Until we have a system that fails to reward wrongful conviction equally with rightful conviction, and prosecutors have to deal with the political pressure of high profile cases, justice is a crap shoot, and its the poor who lose.
Friend, the average stay on death row is solitary confinement for about 20 years. Some have been on death raw far longer. So its not either or, its both. Worse, at least in Gen Pop, there's a hope for making human contact. In solitary, you see nobody. You talk to nobody. You have nothing to do, nothing to pass the time save the repetition of the horror that you are going to spend 20 long years by yourself and then someone is going to inject you with poison, all for a crime you didn't commit. I don't know. That sound pretty uncivilized to me.
Its way worse than this. Murder trials generate huge public emotion. There is a tremendous pressure to find a guilty party and make them pay. There are also tremendous political incentives here. Win a big case, become Governor someday on a "Hard on Crime" plank, and you best believe the people who prosecute know on what side their bread is buttered. Put them all away and let God sort out the innocent.
Prosecutors have been discovered falsifying evidence, tampering with witnesses, hiding exculpatory evidence that would exonerate the defendant, in short doing every dirty deed under the sun to win a high profile case and maybe be politically set for life. As long as our system of justice is more interested in winning than in finding justice we can expect innocent men going to prison in general and death row specifically.
Under these conditions the Death Penalty isn't a viable social expression. I'll be honest and say, there are mad dogs out there. There are sociopaths and psychopaths and child rapists. By all means drop them in a hole with no bottom. Make them work 100 hr. weeks of hard labor to pay for their prison time, and make restitution to their victims. You just don't need to kill them. We do not become better people by practicing the atrocities of or worst citizens. Taking life is not our place. Prison is punishment for the evil, and incarceration for the incorrigible. We can teach and train most to lead meaningful lives. We currently are more interested in vengeance as a society and it shows in our general behavior. Its perhaps time we started exercising some of those Christian ethics both inside and outside of our prisons.
Excuse me, but up until recently it was virtually impossible to get a person off of death row. It was the work of groups like the Innocence Project that has made it possible for people on death row to get one last chance of getting justice. What the project has discovered is a shocking number of instances of prosecutorial misconduct including the hiding or destruction of exculpation evidence that would have exonerated innocent men from going to death row. A number of states who are concerned that they'll have to deal with the embarrassment and legal cost of wrongful prosecution have stonewalled the project and fought hard against the retesting of tried death row inmates using modern DNA technology. This is not a demonstration of a system that works, it is in fact an indictment of a system that is failing miserably. If you would have bothered to even do the simplest of searches before sharing your opinion, you'd know that since 1970 over 140 people have been released from death row due to irrefutable evidence of their innocence and with new DNA technology that number is accelerating, Since then over 1200 people have been executed and of those we now know a number of these people were innocent. Those released later spent an average of nearly 10 years in prison and now Texas has put an express lane in (to quote Ron White) to solve that problem, but it still leaves us with killing more innocent people. I would argue strongly the system in not functional and if you can't be even reasonably certain that the guy on death row did it, you shouldn't be executing him, no matter how good it is for the Prosecutor's career.
The straw man arguments doesn't change the fact anything. You can't go around spouting self acknowledged uninformed opinions that are clearly disputed by mountains of fact and expect to persuade anybody who has even the vaguest ability to make choices based on simple logic.
The problem is that every sane way of measuring the efficacy of the death penalty as a deterrent time and time again tells us it doesn't work. In fact states with the death penalty tend to consistently have higher incidents of capital crimes. If you're executing innocent people as has been proven time and time again by the Innocents Project, if you have prosecutors short circuiting justice to improve their prosecution record for their budding political career, if the death penalty doesn't stop murders and if it is being unfairly applied against the poor and ethnic minorities and mentally ill, then on what basis can you possibly condone socially sanctioned murder?
Retribution is an ugly game for society to be playing. In the end, it makes us no better than those we execute.
The death penalty is barbarous and unfairly applied. Wealthy people who can afford fair representation walk when almost certainly guilty, and poor who have no such defense go to their death in a number of cases innocent. The fact that the death penalty unfairly selects against the poor and members of ethnic and religious minorities is a well established fact. That alone should be sufficient reason to end the practice.
You say it saves money, but in fact this is a common misconception. Because of the nature of capital trials the legal process alone costs the tax payers millions of dollars, add to that 20 years of appeals and post trial legal process and the average capital crime costs the tax payers dozens of times more than a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Even more important, if the wrong man is convicted you can make things right, something that is impossible to do if you take his life. Recently a man was executed in Texas, convicted of an arson fire resulting in the deaths of his two daughters. In fact upon reinvestigation by new technology which has been overturning long held beliefs regarding arson, this man was almost certainly innocent and railroaded to the death house by a prosecutorial body that is known to execute first and ask questions later.
Our society has become increasingly vindictive and blood thirsty. Strangely enough this is especially marked in the Bible Belt, where one would think "Turn the other cheek" would be the order of the day when in fact "Kill them all and let God sort them out":seems to be a closer call. This ease with which we take revenge on people seems to be a trend growing from the lynchings and vigilante killings of the last century. These act were particularly noted for their violence, brutality and lack of any sane justification. Innocent men were murdered as quickly as guilty and a certain blood lust was evident in all these proceedings.
It is time for our society to rise above the criminals whom we prosecute. As long as we indulge in legally sanctioned murder we cannot hope to achieve this end. If you want to find out just how broken the death penalty is, please feel free to read the huge amount of information available at Amnesty International and The Innocence Project. Where people take the lives of others whatever their crime, there can be no civil society.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand... Steve was dying, and Google mocked him by making a hydra in the shape of his greatest brain child. That damned Android just wouldn't die, and the more heads Steve cut off, the more the damn thing would grow. He had to crush Google and its Gawd forsaken Android. He had no choice but to jettison every bit of Google from the AppleSphere. If it hurts Apple, so be it, Android must be obliterated or the space time continuum will shatter!
So clearly you must see it was a simple business decision.
Is there a correlation between vegetarianism and IOS adoption? Jobs had all the Buddhist mojo going on... in fact he tried to heal his cancer with his MIND... if he'd just gone and gotten regular therapy when he first discovered his illness, he'd almost certainly still be with us today... Om Mani Padme Hum...
And the author whose fine work you're enjoying is remunerated how?
Actually, in keeping with the whole Borg thought line, Balmer's head being lowered in to a Borg Queen body, only she's a pot bellied pig in a space suit... that would be fun... a bit inflammatory, but fun. The whole, we're going to beat the water with our over priced desktop software hoping to chase our customers into our subscription net only works if there's no place else to go. Looks like Google Apps is going to clean up. Poor Balmer, a penny shy and a day late... again.
As for Apple icon, you could do an Ant Hill with an Apple logo... you could do an ant farm, and have all the tunnels draw Steve Job's face... You could take a robot from "I Robot" and stencil iUser on its forehead. Just a few thoughts.
Yeah, everyone new Scully couldn't run Apple without Mulder... The OS-X Files... lovin' it...
The Libertarian? Green? Communist, Peace and Freedom... Now that would be a smackdown on the Republicrats!!!
Sure there is, elect representatives who are clearly willing to create a constitutional amendment separating corporation and state. Return corporations to a sane level of power and wealth. Design them such that they can have great size, but the larger they are, the more limited their social strength, so they can't use their size to hijack the social process. Tax all corporations at a fix rate of 18% with no loopholes. Make any political representative found to be taking money from corporations ground for instant censure and removal from legislative body, you want to make it really hurt, require the representatives replacement come from the opposite party (that way you get help to stay on the wagon, as it were.) You can build all kinds of checks and balances into the system. It just takes the people of this nation getting a clue then getting off their fat collective asses.
Everyone here seems to be adding their own opinions none of which are suggested or demonstrated in the article. The basis for the conversation is that the green revolution should have made it possible for us to increase the green biomass. What we're seeing is that the green we grow is offset by wild green that grows less and the total green biomass remains constant. This isn't to say it will remain constant for any arbitrary length of time.
So this tells us we can grow one 2500 sequoia, or a similar mass of corn or wheat or soybeans in any given year. We also know that the tropical forests are under assault and because the wealth if tropical forests tend to be in their canopy and not their soul, a cleared area results in erosion and growing desertification. It will be interesting to see in 10 years when we can begin to see what the legacy of slash and burn forest clearing is doing to the Tropical places on earth. Add to that heat stress and drought and we will be seeing new and interesting changes.
The problem is that there were a number of case of extraordinary rendition where innocent people were kidnapped by the U.S. Government, taken to the middle east where they were tortured then eventually dumped someplace else or in some cases died of the torture process. One of the more popular cases was that of Maher Arar, a Canadian telecommunications engineer with dual citizenship in Canada and Syria whose only mistake was landing in the U.S. for a flight layover on his way back home. What followed would have made a great situation comedy if torture hadn't been involved. The U.S. is stonewalling these cases to this day. There are so many horror stories the case of Aafia Siddiqui is so terrible, it made me nauseous reading it. I think the person the GP may be speaking of was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment. He was a University Professor (and was himself an immigrant from the Middle East) at a major school in New England and had posted flyer to get students together to discuss what the Government was doing and whether it served our culture to abandon the Geneva Convention. The result is that he himself was kidnapped and in an act of extraordinary rendition spent the next 18 months as a guest of the U.S. Government seeing a number of fascinating torture facilities in the middle east. His abuse was severe and the damage to his body and his mind permanent. Eventually he was dumped naked and found his way to Canada where he and his family now live. The US claims no knowledge of what happened to him.
There's a great book about rendition by a former CIA agent, and what he says basically is that the people who pushed this insanity through knew nothing about interrogation or intelligence, and that their choice to ignore the Geneva Convention damaged us far more than any attack from the outside ever could.
Listening to the sides I'm left with an overwhelming feeling that someone (whose project starts with an 'X'), got lazy, took short cuts, rationalized a whole bunch of cheesy decisions as within the spirit of Open Source, if not in fact by the letter. This is a cautionary tale of how people find themselves in a tight spot by cutting corners. You start with 100% integrity and everything is plugging along like gangbusters. But its a lotta work, and you're a busy guy, so you shave a few points, because hell, who's gonna notice. So now you're running at 96%, but that's still great, you're playing with way more integrity than a lot of guys out there and you're proud that for the most part your work is solid. Only that 96%, becomes your new 100%, and before long, you figure hell it worked fine last time so I'll shave a few more points and cut a few more corners. Before long you running at 7% integrity, nothing is happening when you say it will, or if it does its because you lied, cheated and stole to do it. Worse when someone confronts what a sleaze you've been, you have to demonize them. because you've built this who complicated rational to justify all the cheesy crap you've been pulling.
By the way, any one of us could get all preachy, but this behavior is as human as squirting our young'ns. Common as dirt. So, at one level, our intrepid slacker can say, hey, everyone else is doing it, and he's pretty much right. Only its why things suck in the world. No integrity. Not even like integrity as a moral state, but simple integrity like functional, complete, workable. Our political leaders, corporations, school administrators, dedicatedly self devoted are all cutting corners. Pointing fingers and exclaiming, well I'm not as bad as he or she is, and only a tight-ass would care anyway, right?
Being a person of integrity is like being pregnant. You are or you aren't. Do whatever little monkey dance you want to camouflage your behavior to high heaven, what you did was cheesy, then you tried to cover it up, then you tried to work around it, and finally you white washed it with jailhouse lawyering, and still, not a bit of it washes, not a bit of comes clean. The answer is you stop and begin doing the right thing. You honor the GPL. You acknowledge the code author. You share your source. You do it straight by the numbers. Or you don't, but don't try to justify yourself, just be honest and admit you're lazy and a little bit larcenous. There are worse things. Right?
Less filling, taste great, make you grow three heads!!!
In western culture we have this strange idea of what it means to forgive. So forgiving doesn't mean agreeing with, condoning, or promoting what another has done in any way. It does mean giving up the right to hold resentment or to punish. Forgiving is something a person does or a society can do. In the case of those who commit great atrocities it is perfectly reasonable for individuals to forgive, while society demands some form of retribution. Did you see dead man walking. The Susan Sarandon character was a perfect example of personal forgiveness. You do not forgive to release the guilty, you forgive to liberate the innocent.
Let me put this another way. Do you think for a moment this guilty person cares a wit what you think or how you feel. So you can choose to bear the burden of toxic emotions, or you can choose to divest yourself of hatred (even where deserved) so that your soul is liberated from darkness. A wise man once said vengeance is poison you swallow hoping the other person will die.
Actually the trials themselves are so much more expensive that they alone would make the the simple life without parole a profoundly less expensive proposition. Murder trial cost millions of dollars. The trials are by design harder to prosecute, therefore huge resources are brought to bear to ensure a desired outcome, and that makes these trial huge ticket items that has been so expensive that a number of states are looking to end the death penalty as a simple cost cutting measure.
The very problem you pose is that this person commits such a heinous act that you want to return the act in kind, letting him lower you to the same level. I realize its a profound human desire to sweep the earth clean of such a walking atrocity, but you must work to maintain your own soul, and dignity when facing such evil. So you do a far site more than simply house this animal for the next 50 years. You can make him work to make restitution. You can show him to your children and your children's children. This is what a monster looks like. He put his beliefs above the lives and futures of 77 good and decent people. This is what we do with monsters. We put them in tiny holes and night and we work them like dogs during the day, and squeeze a little good out this horrible pile of reeking bad. We come up with new and exciting ways to use this scum. Perhaps in 20 years he finds God and has a change or heart, or not. We give him every opportunity to transform and we use that as a lesson too. How we take the worst human toxic waste and in the end mine it for some human dignity. This is about the possibility of healing, and that always begins with an act of forgiving, not to let the monster off the hook, but to let yourself off the hook.
I am way anti-death penalty, but you don't know what you're taking about here. Nitrogen Narcosis is perhaps one of the nicest ways to cash in your chips available to human kind, you go out giddy, happy, painless as hell... then lights out sweet prince. It's the build up of CO2 that causes all the nasty things you're describing. CO2 in the blood causes acidosis and over about 12% becomes a real horror to be any part of. You breath pure N2, and you excrete your CO2 just like normal, just no O2 to sustain the metabolic machinery. Real quick you go bye bye. In fact a number of states looked at N2 as a humane death penalty and most decided no, because the prisoners died with blissful smiles and they wanted them to suffer a little for the benefit of the victims witnessing.
Tell me that isn't just a little messed up...
In fact in recent years with the shortage of prison space (the ongoing disaster that is our war on drugs), and the growing epidemic of crime fueled by drugs (primarily street gangs), prisons have become part of a plea bargain revolving door merry-go-round. People get sand bagged, prosecutors throw the book at you, heaping felony after felony until you're looking at a potential prison term that looks like the half life of the universe. Then they throw you a sweet deal to be out is no time at all, and even if you're innocent, you can't afford to pass it up, because if you lose you go away until hell freezes over. So now we have innocents in prison and monsters who get out in no time at all to help process the mess that is out legal justice system.
A high standard of juris prudence would begin by making certain that Prosecutors weren't using their office as a political spring board and that their measure for success included how many innocent people they let go as well as how many bad guys they put in jail. Getting it right should trump being hard on crime. We should punish prosecutors who are as hard on innocence as they are on crime.
New technologies promise to give us the ability to virtually read minds in the near future. Witnesses are horrible, every study proves that people are terrible at remembering traumatic events accurately. Your biological memories don't lie. When we can see your memory, we'll get the truth and you will be either innocent or guilty. You still have the right not to self incriminate, but then you have to live with evidence at trial, and jurors think pleading the fifth is just another way of saying you caught me red handed. I look forward to far fewer bogus convictions.
Wow... I'm not even sure where to start with this. Since 1970 over 140 people have been liberated from death row through the later discovery of irrefutable evidence of their innocence. The problem has never been juries. The problem is with Prosecuting Attorneys who've committed morally reprehensible acts to win cases at any cost including the cost of sending innocent people to death row. It happens, there is a rich body of evidence to prove it. So your presumption of guilt is at best a pipe-dream.
We know innocent people get executed. One was just executed in Texas earlier this year and knowing the man was almost certainly innocent, Governor Perry let him meet his maker. That's our justice system. Its wimpy to let someone off of death row, we kill people. The whole point is that there are countless people doing the time who didn't do the crime. Our criminal justice system is flat busted. Really, its all broke up. Innocent people all over the place taking pleas to avoid spending draconian sentences in prison. Guilty monsters that need to be locked up forever, doing almost no time in a revolving door legal system. That by definition is broken.
I agree prosecute the squeal right out of the little piggies from Wall Street... maybe taking away their wealth, privilege and their beliefs that they're above the laws of the land would be make them excellent examples to those who might follow in their footsteps. Making Sausage of them seems a wee bit extreme. Let the punishment fit the crime. Have them spend the rest of their lives doing house work at homeless shelters. Make a contribution to society as well as teach them a little humility. Executing them sound a little French Revolution for my taste (remember a lot of good people were killed during the French Revolution for no more reason than their powdered wig was a wee bit too nice.
Again this absolute certainly without even a popcorn fart of evidence to back it up. Murder for the most part is an act of hot blood. Its a passionate thing based on fear or anger or jealousy or revenge. The part of the brain at work isn't making careful plans. This is an idiot and his homies gunning down a competing gang member in retaliation for an earlier drive by and as a byproduct they also gun down a half dozen innocent bystanders.
If you think for a moment they give a second thought to death penalty. These are guys dealing in day to day life threatening violence, the idea that an event 20 years away would have any weight in the way they think is simply ludicrous. Perhaps the death penalty deters homicidal actuaries, or vengeful logicians, but the rest of society is pretty much unable to make plans long term enough to include the consequences of managing 10 pounds let alone how their lives would be impacted by a death sentence.
People don't kill because its wrong. People who do kill, do so because their ability to manage their emotional state has been exceeded and therefore making logical choices is no longer possible. For the serial killers, and sociopaths, and psychopaths, you want to execute them, I don't agree, but if you can prove them guilty with absolute certainty, then I guess those special cases might be an exception. I'm just saying as long as the current system is so deeply buggered you advocate serious darkness without much solid logical ground to stand on.
Stop arguing the point on intangibles and deal with the facts. Since 1970 over 10% of the people on death row have been released upon discovery of their innocence through recent advances like DNA. That would suggest we've been killing innocent people for a long time and there is in fact excellent evidence to support that finding. That's not some fly in the ointment, that a full blown failure of the system. Until we have a system that fails to reward wrongful conviction equally with rightful conviction, and prosecutors have to deal with the political pressure of high profile cases, justice is a crap shoot, and its the poor who lose.
Friend, the average stay on death row is solitary confinement for about 20 years. Some have been on death raw far longer. So its not either or, its both. Worse, at least in Gen Pop, there's a hope for making human contact. In solitary, you see nobody. You talk to nobody. You have nothing to do, nothing to pass the time save the repetition of the horror that you are going to spend 20 long years by yourself and then someone is going to inject you with poison, all for a crime you didn't commit. I don't know. That sound pretty uncivilized to me.
Its way worse than this. Murder trials generate huge public emotion. There is a tremendous pressure to find a guilty party and make them pay. There are also tremendous political incentives here. Win a big case, become Governor someday on a "Hard on Crime" plank, and you best believe the people who prosecute know on what side their bread is buttered. Put them all away and let God sort out the innocent.
Prosecutors have been discovered falsifying evidence, tampering with witnesses, hiding exculpatory evidence that would exonerate the defendant, in short doing every dirty deed under the sun to win a high profile case and maybe be politically set for life. As long as our system of justice is more interested in winning than in finding justice we can expect innocent men going to prison in general and death row specifically.
Under these conditions the Death Penalty isn't a viable social expression. I'll be honest and say, there are mad dogs out there. There are sociopaths and psychopaths and child rapists. By all means drop them in a hole with no bottom. Make them work 100 hr. weeks of hard labor to pay for their prison time, and make restitution to their victims. You just don't need to kill them. We do not become better people by practicing the atrocities of or worst citizens. Taking life is not our place. Prison is punishment for the evil, and incarceration for the incorrigible. We can teach and train most to lead meaningful lives. We currently are more interested in vengeance as a society and it shows in our general behavior. Its perhaps time we started exercising some of those Christian ethics both inside and outside of our prisons.
Excuse me, but up until recently it was virtually impossible to get a person off of death row. It was the work of groups like the Innocence Project that has made it possible for people on death row to get one last chance of getting justice. What the project has discovered is a shocking number of instances of prosecutorial misconduct including the hiding or destruction of exculpation evidence that would have exonerated innocent men from going to death row. A number of states who are concerned that they'll have to deal with the embarrassment and legal cost of wrongful prosecution have stonewalled the project and fought hard against the retesting of tried death row inmates using modern DNA technology. This is not a demonstration of a system that works, it is in fact an indictment of a system that is failing miserably. If you would have bothered to even do the simplest of searches before sharing your opinion, you'd know that since 1970 over 140 people have been released from death row due to irrefutable evidence of their innocence and with new DNA technology that number is accelerating, Since then over 1200 people have been executed and of those we now know a number of these people were innocent. Those released later spent an average of nearly 10 years in prison and now Texas has put an express lane in (to quote Ron White) to solve that problem, but it still leaves us with killing more innocent people. I would argue strongly the system in not functional and if you can't be even reasonably certain that the guy on death row did it, you shouldn't be executing him, no matter how good it is for the Prosecutor's career.
The straw man arguments doesn't change the fact anything. You can't go around spouting self acknowledged uninformed opinions that are clearly disputed by mountains of fact and expect to persuade anybody who has even the vaguest ability to make choices based on simple logic.
Go to the Innocents Project, it hasn't just happened. It happen a lot.
The problem is that every sane way of measuring the efficacy of the death penalty as a deterrent time and time again tells us it doesn't work. In fact states with the death penalty tend to consistently have higher incidents of capital crimes. If you're executing innocent people as has been proven time and time again by the Innocents Project, if you have prosecutors short circuiting justice to improve their prosecution record for their budding political career, if the death penalty doesn't stop murders and if it is being unfairly applied against the poor and ethnic minorities and mentally ill, then on what basis can you possibly condone socially sanctioned murder?
Retribution is an ugly game for society to be playing. In the end, it makes us no better than those we execute.
The death penalty is barbarous and unfairly applied. Wealthy people who can afford fair representation walk when almost certainly guilty, and poor who have no such defense go to their death in a number of cases innocent. The fact that the death penalty unfairly selects against the poor and members of ethnic and religious minorities is a well established fact. That alone should be sufficient reason to end the practice.
You say it saves money, but in fact this is a common misconception. Because of the nature of capital trials the legal process alone costs the tax payers millions of dollars, add to that 20 years of appeals and post trial legal process and the average capital crime costs the tax payers dozens of times more than a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Even more important, if the wrong man is convicted you can make things right, something that is impossible to do if you take his life. Recently a man was executed in Texas, convicted of an arson fire resulting in the deaths of his two daughters. In fact upon reinvestigation by new technology which has been overturning long held beliefs regarding arson, this man was almost certainly innocent and railroaded to the death house by a prosecutorial body that is known to execute first and ask questions later.
Our society has become increasingly vindictive and blood thirsty. Strangely enough this is especially marked in the Bible Belt, where one would think "Turn the other cheek" would be the order of the day when in fact "Kill them all and let God sort them out":seems to be a closer call. This ease with which we take revenge on people seems to be a trend growing from the lynchings and vigilante killings of the last century. These act were particularly noted for their violence, brutality and lack of any sane justification. Innocent men were murdered as quickly as guilty and a certain blood lust was evident in all these proceedings.
It is time for our society to rise above the criminals whom we prosecute. As long as we indulge in legally sanctioned murder we cannot hope to achieve this end. If you want to find out just how broken the death penalty is, please feel free to read the huge amount of information available at Amnesty International and The Innocence Project. Where people take the lives of others whatever their crime, there can be no civil society.