And I give you an F for believing that the life of a murderer is worth more than the lives of his victims.
The Internet really is destroying reading comprehension.
I never said the life of a murderer is worth more than the lives of his victims (nor do I believe it).
I said that my first objection to the death penalty is that innocent people were executed. The best example is the people who have been executed for murder by arson, based on forensic evidence that has now been discredited by the entire scientific community.
Do you mean that if I valued the lives of the victims, I'd want to execute an innocent person?
First a guy loses his children in a fire (at least sometimes through no fault of his own). Then, on top of that tragedy (and losing your child is the worst tragedy in the world) the district attorney falsely accuses him of murder, prosecutes him, gets a stupid jury to convict him, and executes an innocent man for arson.
Are you OK with that?
How does that do his children any good?
How does that do the surviving members of the victim's family any good?
Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and India aren't "civilized countries"?
I was in Singapore for a week. It was like Chinatown without news stands -- if you can imagine such a thing. I couldn't find a copy of the Asian Wall Street Journal anywhere.
The Asian WSJ had written critically of the Lee Administration's policies of censoring the opposition by bringing frivolous libel suits against rival politicians and bankrupting them (people who are bankrupted aren't allowed to serve in the Singapore congress -- clever). So the Lee Administration sued the Asian WSJ for libel.
The WSJ abandoned its principles and published a groveling apology. As a result, they could send a fixed number of copies to Singapore, but it was like trying to find an uncensored American magazine in Soviet Russia.
Finally, the concierge at a 5-star hotel got me a copy of the Asian WSJ. It reported that an Indian playwright had gone to jail because she insisted on performing a feminist play that the Singapore government had censored.
(I also read in the WSJ that the "paddling" which outsiders treated as a joke is actually a brutal beating which Lee used against his political opponents.)
I was in Singapore for a scientific conference, and on the positive side I was charmed by the high school and college students reading science textbooks everywhere, and their love for science and education. Lee is rightly proud of bringing his people out of medieval poverty and illiteracy into modern education and civilization. So is Fidel Castro. They both did it at the expense of human rights.
Civilized? I'd give them a C. Work harder on human rights.
Problem is that, as every other civilized country agrees, killing criminals is wrong and barbaric.
My uncles fought in World War II, and their satisfaction at seeing Nazi officers hanged made an impression on me. I might accept executions if I were sure that (1) The people who were executed actually were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and (2) Everybody who committed the same crime got the same punishment. I'm convinced that will never happen in America.
My quick argument against capital punishment is
(1) Innocent people have been executed, most irrefutably people who have been executed on the basis of now-discredited forensic evidence, particularly parents who have been executed for killing their children with arson on the basis of "accelerant" theories, and for murder on the basis of bite-mark matching.
A father comes home, sees his house in flames, his children dead in a fire. Then the district attorney prosecutes him for murdering his children with an arson fire, and executes an innocent man. It's not enough that his children die, you have to blame him and execute him too. It happened repeatedly. Does that disturb your sense of justice?
(2) A millionaire has never been executed in the U.S.
And little Suzie doesn't get to go to college because Daddy blew the family savings buying quack treatments in Bangcock. Yep, I don't see anything wrong with your approach. Nothing at all!
That makes more sense than some people may think.
In the U.S., with its free market health care system, some legitimate drugs are so expensive that patients decide they'd rather skip it and leave the money to their grandchildren.
The New York Times had a few stories about the new, expensive cancer drugs which cost up to $100,000 and don't cure the disease but only extend survival by about 6 months, and they quoted a few patients who decided it wasn't worth the money (and side effects). They'd rather leave the money to their grandchildren.
Screener asks a person "is there a bomb in your bag?"
Realizing what a stupid question that is, he says "yes". Turns out security guys don't realize they're asking stupid questions.
Yes, I read about a case like that. Homeland Security insisted on prosecuting the guy, for a felony. He went to trial. The jury found him innocent. It turned out juries don't like to convict people of felonies for making jokes. They changed the law to make it a misdemeanor.
Sorry to restrict your freedom, but in the U.S., and most modern countries, employers and employees don't have complete freedom to set terms of employment. You can't require your employees to have sex with you. You can't unreasonably require your employees not to compete with you after they leave.
Lawyers define terms like "voluntary" in different ways for different purposes. I don't think a lie detector test or anything else is voluntary if your boss orders you to do it as a condition of the job. You can go to Roget's Thesaurus and pick a different word if you prefer.
I wouldn't want my rant to discourage anyone from getting a Meccano set if they're really available. I tried to buy one 2-3 years ago, and I found out the original company had gone into receivership, and nothing like the original Meccano sets were available *at that time.*
Checking Wikipedia and the "official" Meccano web site, I see that there are kits available, but they're not like the original kits. I don't know if they're equivalent -- I have no objection to using plastic instead of metal when plastic will do the job as well.
There also seem to be a few knockoff versions of Meccano, from China, I think.
Give it a try, gamble $50, and you might come up with something useful. But don't throw out those popsicle sticks.
The other thing I would point out was that the NSC in the video required its employees or applicants to sign a statement that their test was "voluntary." That was a lie. It was coerced. If you didn't take the test, you wouldn't get the job.
And that makes it involuntary how, exactly? The entire application for the job is voluntary. You don't have to jump through any hoops (including a polygraph), just as they don't have to give you the job. Simply put, if you can walk away at any time without suffering any harm (or threat of harm) to your property or person then you are not being coerced.
There are court cases that have determined whether agreement or acceptance was voluntary under different circumstances.
If you're required to do something to keep a job, courts may decide it isn't voluntary.
For example, if you ask a job applicant or employee to have sex with you as a condition of getting or keeping a job, she can walk away at any time without suffering any harm (or threat of harm) to her property or person. But courts today regard that as coerced and not voluntary.
For example, a police officer's supervisors generally have a right to question the officer about what happened in the course of his duties. But there were cases where police officers were accused of abuse. They were questioned by their supervisors, and their responses were used to convict them of crimes. They appealed, and their convictions were reversed, because, the courts said, they were coerced into answering the questions as a condition of keeping their job, and the answers were therefore involuntary (for purposes of the Fifth Amendment). Now (at least in New York and New Jersey), supervisors don't question officers any more after possible police abuse, because, they say, the answers aren't voluntary, can't be used against them, and their answers would contaminate the investigation and make it more difficult to convict them.
You're free to define "voluntary" and "coercion" in any way you want, but I wouldn't call a lie detector test "voluntary."
If you're forced to do something that you don't want to do, in order to avoid adverse consequences, I don't call that voluntary.
There are some science concepts that are appropriate for preschool, and some that aren't. Molecules, for example, are too abstract.
Engineering is something that you can teach kids at any age, if you do it right. What is engineering, if not building blocks as high as you can until they fall down?
There was a great series of preschool science books by Seymour Simon http://www.seymoursimon.com/ which taught engineering, among other things. Talk about load bearing supports. He showed you how to fold a piece of paper to make it strong enough to hold a weight, how to make little bridges, etc. Since then, Seymour Simon has become an industry, and he's become more conventional. It was actually easier to go through his books and find the good ones when there were fewer of them. But if you go to the library (preferably with a preschool kid) you'll find a lot of great books.
Want your kids to grow up with a healthy respect for / interest in engineering? Buy them Lego, Meccano (aka Erector Sets),
It is my sad duty to inform you that Meccano went into liquidation in 1971. Their trademark was passed around from manufacturer to manufacturer like a past-her-prime party girl, and they are now basically Lego kits. The Meccano sets of legend, which ingenious British engineers used to build prototypes in war-torn England, are gone forever. For that matter, the Erector sets are now basically Lego kits. And the Lego kits are now basically parts that you click together to make an unimaginative pre-formed standard plastic toy.
That's why so many of the best engineers in the U.S. are Soviet emigres.
If you want to work for the agency, you don't have any choice. Go ahead.
But as AntiPolygraph.org documented, many of the organizations that give you a polygraph make get it wrong, make false accusations, and reject applicants because of false positives. The operators are even under an incentive to reject people, even falsely. Once you get rejected from one agency for failing a lie detector test, you're blackballed from others.
AntiPolygraph.org had a story like that about a guy who applied to a police department in Texas. The examiner accused him of lying, the police department rejected him, and he couldn't do anything about it.
The other thing I would point out was that the NSC in the video required its employees or applicants to sign a statement that their test was "voluntary." That was a lie. It was coerced. If you didn't take the test, you wouldn't get the job.
One of the most annoying things about the procedure is that the whole thing is full of deception and unfairness. They even force you to lie.
You can make your own decision. I wouldn't work for an organization like that. It's not what I'm after in life. What can they offer? You can work in places that are honest.
Really, all you need is to convince the person you're investigating that it works... then if they refuse|agree to take a polygraph they're probably guilty|innocent.
Actually, as AntiPolygraph.org pointed out, it convinces people to submit to an interrogation without a lawyer. Standard interrogation techniques can get you to confess to things (sometimes to things you're not guilty of). They can also collect information that they can use against you in combination with other (mis)information.
Duane said, don't talk to the police if you're innocent. Don't talk to the police if you're guilty. Don't talk to the police without a lawyer.
You can tell the complete truth, and make a true statement that can be used against you to convict you.
Like: "I never liked the guy."
Or: "I was in the next town." Then they finds a witness who honestly thinks she saw you near the scene of the crime, and they use that to impeach your credibility.
I used to read the Stapp Car Crash Proceedings and the technical papers of the Society of Automotive Engineers.
NHTSA compiled extensive data on real-world collisions, and so did foreign governments, such as Australia and Sweden.
Some of the groups that do crash testing are the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Calspan, and Wayne State University.
The crash tests are modeled on real-world collisions in which people are injured. One of the most common collisions is a head-on collision against either a barrier or another car. But there are lots of single-car collisions.
Off of major highways, you have lots of solid barrier collisions. For example, one accident involved a car hitting a stone overpass at high speed, the front end collapsed and the driver died. Under 50mph, wearing seat belts, the driver probably would have lived.
Volvo investigated every fatal accident in Sweden, modeled them in crash labs, and published their results. People in front-end crashes up to 50mph usually lived, and over 60mph usually died. The forces they measured in the crash labs were consistent with this.
The other class of fatal accidents is rollover accidents. In a crash, kinetic energy is converted into rotational energy, and a car starting at 60mph has a lot of rotational energy to disperse. It can roll over a lot. The faster it's going, the more it rolls. The roofs are designed to survive a rollover, but there's only so much they can take. The probability of rollover fatality increases dramatically with speed.
The problem with 2-car collisions on a superhighway isn't a billiard-ball collision. The problem is that a steady state with vehicles nicely separated and moving together is turned into an unstable situation with 1 or 2 cars flying across the road out of control. If the wheels stay on the ground and you slow down to a halt, you're OK. But if the car rolls over, the fatality rate goes up pretty high. (And once you disrupt the smooth flow of traffic you can get hit by a third car.)
Basically, the faster you're going, the more energy you have to get rid of in a crash. That's mv^2. The problem increases as a *square* function of velocity. Think that out.
I haven't followed this for a while, but if anybody knows the latest research I'd be interested. Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed is still a good read.
Yes, I was interested in those cars. I read a couple of articles about them. It's true that they're exceptions.
Apparently they reinforce the frame to an extent that would be impractical in a commercial car (they have room for only one driver), they use a 4-point seat belt, and they use helmets.
The front end and seat belt are much more rigid than in commercial cars. They decelerate through that 50 inches of crush space at higher G force. One of the tradeoffs is you're more likely to have a minor injury at lower speed, but more likely to survive at higher speed.
There were some safety advocates who felt that commercial cars should use more of those design principles, but the auto manufacturers said it would be too expensive.
Some people do survive high-speed accidents. Some people even survive getting thrown out of a car at 50mph (but not if they hit their head). It's a probability, not a certainty. The probability of dying in an accident goes up sharply above 55mph, and even more sharply at 70mph.
I live in Houston on I-10, and due to a huge environmental/safety push they lowered the speed limit from 70 to 55. It was a joke, the highway is built for speed and it has excellent lines of visibility and intelligently designed merging sections, and they make you crawl down it.
The highway may be built for speed, but the cars are not.
Standard cars can survive a front-end collision at about 50mph, and much above that they start to fall apart. They have about 50 inches of crush space in the front, and it takes all 50 inches to decelerate a car from 50mph. Above 50 mph, the engine goes through the passenger compartment and the passenger compartment falls apart. Once the passenger compartment falls apart, the likelihood of survival is much lower -- almost nil. There are engineering limits to the accident speed that you can design a car to survive.
The most dangerous accident is a rollover. Even if you're wearing a seat belt, there's a lot of energy to dissipate and it's impossible to design a car to reliably protect passengers in a rollover at speeds above 50mph.
But when auto engineers collect 100 reports of fatal or near-fatal accidents, they can see clear patterns and one pattern is that fatalities increase sharply above 50mph, for reasons that make a good high school physics class. (The classical paper is by Nils Bolin in the Stapp Car Crash Proceedings in 1967, if you want to look for it on the Internet.)
There's the old question of what speed do you want to drive at and how many lives do you want to sacrifice for it. With the present speeds we lose (Fermi estimate) 50,000 lives a year. So we're talking about a lot of lives.
You can say, "It's my life and it's my decision what risks I want to take." I'm sympathetic to that.
The problem with that is that most people have a very poor sense of what the risks actually are. You drive on the highway all the time and it *looks* safe, and you've never had any trouble. Life-threatening accidents are rare events. You might have only 1 or 2 accidents like that in your entire life -- and just 1 is enough. You're like the guy who jumps off the 50-story building and passing by the 10th floor says, "OK so far!" But you're going to be driving at night, in bad weather, after a couple of drinks, after a prescribed medication, talking on the phone, while sleepy, with mechanical failures. All it takes is one time.
The other problem is that you're sharing the road with other people. First, if you're driving fast, you're going to hurt them more if they have an accident. Second, they have to keep up with your traffic flow.
65mph was probably the best compromise they could get, but above 55mph you're exceeding the designed crashworthiness limits of the car. It's like climbing without a rope. If you get into the fatal crash of your life, you'll be dead or severely injured. You probably know people who have died in auto accidents above 50mph. Was it worth it?
intentionally misrepresenting someone as something that is patently false is libel or slander depending on how it is done. This is a criminal offense.
What country are you from? First of all, libel is not a criminal offense in the U.S. (or most other democratic countries). Libel hasn't been a criminal matter since the American Revolution.
Libel is a civil offense, and the subject of the libel is limited to suing for damages in civil court.
Second of all, intentionally misrepresenting someone for purposes of satire and parody is specifically protected by the First Amendment and the Supreme Court. If the claims are so outrageous that no reasonable person would believe them, there's no libel. The more outrageous the claims, the weaker the case for libel.
The leading case is Hustler Magazine, Inc. et al. v. Jerry Falwell. Falwell sued Hustler for an advertisement parody that portrayed him as having had a drunken sexual encounter with his mother in an outhouse.
As the judge said in TFA, you can make it a teachable moment. People in the U.S. have a right to satirize figures of authority. Satire can be painful, but that's the price we pay for a free society.
I cannot provide a citation, only anecdote. My last 2 health insurance companies surcharged you for being a smoker or living with one. They said they reserved the right to refuse payment for any "traditional smoker's disease" or some-such if you got sick and didn't pay up.
I am assuming, that if you paid then quit smoking and therefore stopped paying the surcharge, you were still screwed for the money later on if you got sick.
I can't believe that.
There are some companies that have surcharges for smokers, but refusing payment for "traditional smoker's disease" doesn't make sense. Smoking increases or worsens so many of the most common diseases that such a policy would be worthless. It wouldn't cover heart disease, stroke, or most cancers.
That's not a rational stop-smoking policy, it's just an excuse for the insurance company to blame the victim and refuse to fulfill their end of the bargain.
Can you give me the names and state of those insurance companies?
This happens a lot. The sticking point is often that the patent owner offers the research lab a license to use their technology, but the lab has to sign an agreement to turn over the rights to all the commercially useful results of the lab's research to the patent holder. Often the agreement is so onerous, the researchers refuse to sign.
With the BRCA gene patent that was recently overturned, the lab could do research with the BRCA test for free, but if they found out one of their subjects was positive for the BRCA gene, they weren't allowed to tell the subject, because Myriad Genetics was charging $3,000 per test.
As to the prior art -- I thought the same thing. Academic scientists always publish anything useful, and if it was published, it would be prior art.
So what you are saying is that because certain legal cases support this principle, that makes it the law?
Yes, that's the way the law works. U.S. law is derived from English law, and English law is based on the development of legal cases over time. In the U.S., judges additionally have to interpret the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, which applies here.
You just have to understand the law. Go to the library and look up a book on introduction to the law.
On this point, you can read the book, Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study, by Karl Nickerson Llewellyn.
Separation of power means that the judiciary can strike down laws if they violate the Constitution, which is the highest law.
The legislature is one power. They pass laws. The judiciary is a separate power. They strike down laws if they violate the Constitution.
The oil companies pay "restitution" at a deep discount.
We don't know what all the damage is. The oil companies only pay for the damage we know about. So they get off free for all the damage we don't know about.
And you can't quantify some damages. When I go to New Orleans, I used to see the birds. Now I might not. What's the value of that? How much should BP compensate me? Do I get a voucher for $20 that I can use to watch wildlife documentaries instead?
These environmental catastrophes don't destroy the inefficient, incompetent companies. The last company I heard of that was destroyed because of its incompetence was Johns-Manville, the asbestos company that knew according to confidential company memos that its asbestos was killing people but didn't tell its customers. (In France, the executives would have gone to jail.) They were hit with a lot of product liability suits and went bankrupt. Now they're back in business. Suppose you get mesothelioma, which means you're going to die at age 45 rather than age 75. You sue the asbestos company and get $3 million. Does that make you whole? No, you're still dead. Maybe you would be happy to die if you got $30 million instead. But you can only get so much money out of the asbestos companies, because they're bankrupt.
Conclusion: You can't make people whole after they're harmed. In fact, the threat of massive damages doesn't even deter companies from taking risks that will harm the population. You can only prevent harm beforehand, by having the government regulate dangerous industries. If you cut government regulations, like Bush (and now Obama) did, you're going to have disasters, and the companies responsible can't make the victims whole.
Slashdot Mirror
And I give you an F for believing that the life of a murderer is worth more than the lives of his victims.
The Internet really is destroying reading comprehension.
I never said the life of a murderer is worth more than the lives of his victims (nor do I believe it).
I said that my first objection to the death penalty is that innocent people were executed. The best example is the people who have been executed for murder by arson, based on forensic evidence that has now been discredited by the entire scientific community.
Do you mean that if I valued the lives of the victims, I'd want to execute an innocent person?
First a guy loses his children in a fire (at least sometimes through no fault of his own). Then, on top of that tragedy (and losing your child is the worst tragedy in the world) the district attorney falsely accuses him of murder, prosecutes him, gets a stupid jury to convict him, and executes an innocent man for arson.
Are you OK with that?
How does that do his children any good?
How does that do the surviving members of the victim's family any good?
Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and India aren't "civilized countries"?
I was in Singapore for a week. It was like Chinatown without news stands -- if you can imagine such a thing. I couldn't find a copy of the Asian Wall Street Journal anywhere.
The Asian WSJ had written critically of the Lee Administration's policies of censoring the opposition by bringing frivolous libel suits against rival politicians and bankrupting them (people who are bankrupted aren't allowed to serve in the Singapore congress -- clever). So the Lee Administration sued the Asian WSJ for libel.
The WSJ abandoned its principles and published a groveling apology. As a result, they could send a fixed number of copies to Singapore, but it was like trying to find an uncensored American magazine in Soviet Russia.
Finally, the concierge at a 5-star hotel got me a copy of the Asian WSJ. It reported that an Indian playwright had gone to jail because she insisted on performing a feminist play that the Singapore government had censored.
(I also read in the WSJ that the "paddling" which outsiders treated as a joke is actually a brutal beating which Lee used against his political opponents.)
I was in Singapore for a scientific conference, and on the positive side I was charmed by the high school and college students reading science textbooks everywhere, and their love for science and education. Lee is rightly proud of bringing his people out of medieval poverty and illiteracy into modern education and civilization. So is Fidel Castro. They both did it at the expense of human rights.
Civilized? I'd give them a C. Work harder on human rights.
Problem is that, as every other civilized country agrees, killing criminals is wrong and barbaric.
My uncles fought in World War II, and their satisfaction at seeing Nazi officers hanged made an impression on me. I might accept executions if I were sure that (1) The people who were executed actually were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and (2) Everybody who committed the same crime got the same punishment. I'm convinced that will never happen in America.
My quick argument against capital punishment is
(1) Innocent people have been executed, most irrefutably people who have been executed on the basis of now-discredited forensic evidence, particularly parents who have been executed for killing their children with arson on the basis of "accelerant" theories, and for murder on the basis of bite-mark matching.
A father comes home, sees his house in flames, his children dead in a fire. Then the district attorney prosecutes him for murdering his children with an arson fire, and executes an innocent man. It's not enough that his children die, you have to blame him and execute him too. It happened repeatedly. Does that disturb your sense of justice?
(2) A millionaire has never been executed in the U.S.
And little Suzie doesn't get to go to college because Daddy blew the family savings buying quack treatments in Bangcock. Yep, I don't see anything wrong with your approach. Nothing at all!
That makes more sense than some people may think.
In the U.S., with its free market health care system, some legitimate drugs are so expensive that patients decide they'd rather skip it and leave the money to their grandchildren.
The New York Times had a few stories about the new, expensive cancer drugs which cost up to $100,000 and don't cure the disease but only extend survival by about 6 months, and they quoted a few patients who decided it wasn't worth the money (and side effects). They'd rather leave the money to their grandchildren.
I am Radek.
Screener asks a person "is there a bomb in your bag?"
Realizing what a stupid question that is, he says "yes". Turns out security guys don't realize they're asking stupid questions.
Yes, I read about a case like that. Homeland Security insisted on prosecuting the guy, for a felony. He went to trial. The jury found him innocent. It turned out juries don't like to convict people of felonies for making jokes. They changed the law to make it a misdemeanor.
In Afghanistan many people traditionally have only one name.
Now they can compare his DNA to Kary Mullis and see where (if at all) they differ.
Sorry to restrict your freedom, but in the U.S., and most modern countries, employers and employees don't have complete freedom to set terms of employment. You can't require your employees to have sex with you. You can't unreasonably require your employees not to compete with you after they leave.
Lawyers define terms like "voluntary" in different ways for different purposes. I don't think a lie detector test or anything else is voluntary if your boss orders you to do it as a condition of the job. You can go to Roget's Thesaurus and pick a different word if you prefer.
I wouldn't want my rant to discourage anyone from getting a Meccano set if they're really available. I tried to buy one 2-3 years ago, and I found out the original company had gone into receivership, and nothing like the original Meccano sets were available *at that time.*
Checking Wikipedia and the "official" Meccano web site, I see that there are kits available, but they're not like the original kits. I don't know if they're equivalent -- I have no objection to using plastic instead of metal when plastic will do the job as well.
There also seem to be a few knockoff versions of Meccano, from China, I think.
Give it a try, gamble $50, and you might come up with something useful. But don't throw out those popsicle sticks.
The other thing I would point out was that the NSC in the video required its employees or applicants to sign a statement that their test was "voluntary." That was a lie. It was coerced. If you didn't take the test, you wouldn't get the job.
And that makes it involuntary how, exactly? The entire application for the job is voluntary. You don't have to jump through any hoops (including a polygraph), just as they don't have to give you the job. Simply put, if you can walk away at any time without suffering any harm (or threat of harm) to your property or person then you are not being coerced.
There are court cases that have determined whether agreement or acceptance was voluntary under different circumstances.
If you're required to do something to keep a job, courts may decide it isn't voluntary.
For example, if you ask a job applicant or employee to have sex with you as a condition of getting or keeping a job, she can walk away at any time without suffering any harm (or threat of harm) to her property or person. But courts today regard that as coerced and not voluntary.
For example, a police officer's supervisors generally have a right to question the officer about what happened in the course of his duties. But there were cases where police officers were accused of abuse. They were questioned by their supervisors, and their responses were used to convict them of crimes. They appealed, and their convictions were reversed, because, the courts said, they were coerced into answering the questions as a condition of keeping their job, and the answers were therefore involuntary (for purposes of the Fifth Amendment). Now (at least in New York and New Jersey), supervisors don't question officers any more after possible police abuse, because, they say, the answers aren't voluntary, can't be used against them, and their answers would contaminate the investigation and make it more difficult to convict them.
You're free to define "voluntary" and "coercion" in any way you want, but I wouldn't call a lie detector test "voluntary."
If you're forced to do something that you don't want to do, in order to avoid adverse consequences, I don't call that voluntary.
There are some science concepts that are appropriate for preschool, and some that aren't. Molecules, for example, are too abstract.
Engineering is something that you can teach kids at any age, if you do it right. What is engineering, if not building blocks as high as you can until they fall down?
There was a great series of preschool science books by Seymour Simon http://www.seymoursimon.com/ which taught engineering, among other things. Talk about load bearing supports. He showed you how to fold a piece of paper to make it strong enough to hold a weight, how to make little bridges, etc. Since then, Seymour Simon has become an industry, and he's become more conventional. It was actually easier to go through his books and find the good ones when there were fewer of them. But if you go to the library (preferably with a preschool kid) you'll find a lot of great books.
Want your kids to grow up with a healthy respect for / interest in engineering? Buy them Lego, Meccano (aka Erector Sets),
It is my sad duty to inform you that Meccano went into liquidation in 1971. Their trademark was passed around from manufacturer to manufacturer like a past-her-prime party girl, and they are now basically Lego kits. The Meccano sets of legend, which ingenious British engineers used to build prototypes in war-torn England, are gone forever. For that matter, the Erector sets are now basically Lego kits. And the Lego kits are now basically parts that you click together to make an unimaginative pre-formed standard plastic toy.
That's why so many of the best engineers in the U.S. are Soviet emigres.
If you want to work for the agency, you don't have any choice. Go ahead.
But as AntiPolygraph.org documented, many of the organizations that give you a polygraph make get it wrong, make false accusations, and reject applicants because of false positives. The operators are even under an incentive to reject people, even falsely. Once you get rejected from one agency for failing a lie detector test, you're blackballed from others.
AntiPolygraph.org had a story like that about a guy who applied to a police department in Texas. The examiner accused him of lying, the police department rejected him, and he couldn't do anything about it.
The other thing I would point out was that the NSC in the video required its employees or applicants to sign a statement that their test was "voluntary." That was a lie. It was coerced. If you didn't take the test, you wouldn't get the job.
One of the most annoying things about the procedure is that the whole thing is full of deception and unfairness. They even force you to lie.
You can make your own decision. I wouldn't work for an organization like that. It's not what I'm after in life. What can they offer? You can work in places that are honest.
Really, all you need is to convince the person you're investigating that it works ... then if they refuse|agree to take a polygraph they're probably guilty|innocent.
Actually, as AntiPolygraph.org pointed out, it convinces people to submit to an interrogation without a lawyer. Standard interrogation techniques can get you to confess to things (sometimes to things you're not guilty of). They can also collect information that they can use against you in combination with other (mis)information.
See the Youtube video of a law school class by law professor James Duane http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8167533318153586646#. (Or see http://flexyourrights.com/)
Duane said, don't talk to the police if you're innocent. Don't talk to the police if you're guilty. Don't talk to the police without a lawyer.
You can tell the complete truth, and make a true statement that can be used against you to convict you.
Like: "I never liked the guy."
Or: "I was in the next town." Then they finds a witness who honestly thinks she saw you near the scene of the crime, and they use that to impeach your credibility.
No, they're mounted. Somebody's mounting them.
I used to read the Stapp Car Crash Proceedings and the technical papers of the Society of Automotive Engineers.
NHTSA compiled extensive data on real-world collisions, and so did foreign governments, such as Australia and Sweden.
Some of the groups that do crash testing are the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Calspan, and Wayne State University.
The crash tests are modeled on real-world collisions in which people are injured. One of the most common collisions is a head-on collision against either a barrier or another car. But there are lots of single-car collisions.
Off of major highways, you have lots of solid barrier collisions. For example, one accident involved a car hitting a stone overpass at high speed, the front end collapsed and the driver died. Under 50mph, wearing seat belts, the driver probably would have lived.
Volvo investigated every fatal accident in Sweden, modeled them in crash labs, and published their results. People in front-end crashes up to 50mph usually lived, and over 60mph usually died. The forces they measured in the crash labs were consistent with this.
The other class of fatal accidents is rollover accidents. In a crash, kinetic energy is converted into rotational energy, and a car starting at 60mph has a lot of rotational energy to disperse. It can roll over a lot. The faster it's going, the more it rolls. The roofs are designed to survive a rollover, but there's only so much they can take. The probability of rollover fatality increases dramatically with speed.
The problem with 2-car collisions on a superhighway isn't a billiard-ball collision. The problem is that a steady state with vehicles nicely separated and moving together is turned into an unstable situation with 1 or 2 cars flying across the road out of control. If the wheels stay on the ground and you slow down to a halt, you're OK. But if the car rolls over, the fatality rate goes up pretty high. (And once you disrupt the smooth flow of traffic you can get hit by a third car.)
Basically, the faster you're going, the more energy you have to get rid of in a crash. That's mv^2. The problem increases as a *square* function of velocity. Think that out.
I haven't followed this for a while, but if anybody knows the latest research I'd be interested. Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed is still a good read.
Yes, I was interested in those cars. I read a couple of articles about them. It's true that they're exceptions.
Apparently they reinforce the frame to an extent that would be impractical in a commercial car (they have room for only one driver), they use a 4-point seat belt, and they use helmets.
The front end and seat belt are much more rigid than in commercial cars. They decelerate through that 50 inches of crush space at higher G force. One of the tradeoffs is you're more likely to have a minor injury at lower speed, but more likely to survive at higher speed.
There were some safety advocates who felt that commercial cars should use more of those design principles, but the auto manufacturers said it would be too expensive.
Some people do survive high-speed accidents. Some people even survive getting thrown out of a car at 50mph (but not if they hit their head). It's a probability, not a certainty. The probability of dying in an accident goes up sharply above 55mph, and even more sharply at 70mph.
I live in Houston on I-10, and due to a huge environmental/safety push they lowered the speed limit from 70 to 55. It was a joke, the highway is built for speed and it has excellent lines of visibility and intelligently designed merging sections, and they make you crawl down it.
The highway may be built for speed, but the cars are not.
Standard cars can survive a front-end collision at about 50mph, and much above that they start to fall apart. They have about 50 inches of crush space in the front, and it takes all 50 inches to decelerate a car from 50mph. Above 50 mph, the engine goes through the passenger compartment and the passenger compartment falls apart. Once the passenger compartment falls apart, the likelihood of survival is much lower -- almost nil. There are engineering limits to the accident speed that you can design a car to survive.
The most dangerous accident is a rollover. Even if you're wearing a seat belt, there's a lot of energy to dissipate and it's impossible to design a car to reliably protect passengers in a rollover at speeds above 50mph.
But when auto engineers collect 100 reports of fatal or near-fatal accidents, they can see clear patterns and one pattern is that fatalities increase sharply above 50mph, for reasons that make a good high school physics class. (The classical paper is by Nils Bolin in the Stapp Car Crash Proceedings in 1967, if you want to look for it on the Internet.)
There's the old question of what speed do you want to drive at and how many lives do you want to sacrifice for it. With the present speeds we lose (Fermi estimate) 50,000 lives a year. So we're talking about a lot of lives.
You can say, "It's my life and it's my decision what risks I want to take." I'm sympathetic to that.
The problem with that is that most people have a very poor sense of what the risks actually are. You drive on the highway all the time and it *looks* safe, and you've never had any trouble. Life-threatening accidents are rare events. You might have only 1 or 2 accidents like that in your entire life -- and just 1 is enough. You're like the guy who jumps off the 50-story building and passing by the 10th floor says, "OK so far!" But you're going to be driving at night, in bad weather, after a couple of drinks, after a prescribed medication, talking on the phone, while sleepy, with mechanical failures. All it takes is one time.
The other problem is that you're sharing the road with other people. First, if you're driving fast, you're going to hurt them more if they have an accident. Second, they have to keep up with your traffic flow.
65mph was probably the best compromise they could get, but above 55mph you're exceeding the designed crashworthiness limits of the car. It's like climbing without a rope. If you get into the fatal crash of your life, you'll be dead or severely injured. You probably know people who have died in auto accidents above 50mph. Was it worth it?
That doesn't grant the school blanket authority over the students' lives however.
The Supreme Court disagrees with you.
"BONG HiTS 4 JESUS".
That's right. The Roberts Supreme Court canceled the First Amendment.
intentionally misrepresenting someone as something that is patently false is libel or slander depending on how it is done. This is a criminal offense.
What country are you from? First of all, libel is not a criminal offense in the U.S. (or most other democratic countries). Libel hasn't been a criminal matter since the American Revolution.
Libel is a civil offense, and the subject of the libel is limited to suing for damages in civil court.
Second of all, intentionally misrepresenting someone for purposes of satire and parody is specifically protected by the First Amendment and the Supreme Court. If the claims are so outrageous that no reasonable person would believe them, there's no libel. The more outrageous the claims, the weaker the case for libel.
The leading case is Hustler Magazine, Inc. et al. v. Jerry Falwell. Falwell sued Hustler for an advertisement parody that portrayed him as having had a drunken sexual encounter with his mother in an outhouse.
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/speech/arts/topic.aspx?topic=parody_satire
As the judge said in TFA, you can make it a teachable moment. People in the U.S. have a right to satirize figures of authority. Satire can be painful, but that's the price we pay for a free society.
I cannot provide a citation, only anecdote. My last 2 health insurance companies surcharged you for being a smoker or living with one. They said they reserved the right to refuse payment for any "traditional smoker's disease" or some-such if you got sick and didn't pay up.
I am assuming, that if you paid then quit smoking and therefore stopped paying the surcharge, you were still screwed for the money later on if you got sick.
I can't believe that.
There are some companies that have surcharges for smokers, but refusing payment for "traditional smoker's disease" doesn't make sense. Smoking increases or worsens so many of the most common diseases that such a policy would be worthless. It wouldn't cover heart disease, stroke, or most cancers.
That's not a rational stop-smoking policy, it's just an excuse for the insurance company to blame the victim and refuse to fulfill their end of the bargain.
Can you give me the names and state of those insurance companies?
This happens a lot. The sticking point is often that the patent owner offers the research lab a license to use their technology, but the lab has to sign an agreement to turn over the rights to all the commercially useful results of the lab's research to the patent holder. Often the agreement is so onerous, the researchers refuse to sign.
With the BRCA gene patent that was recently overturned, the lab could do research with the BRCA test for free, but if they found out one of their subjects was positive for the BRCA gene, they weren't allowed to tell the subject, because Myriad Genetics was charging $3,000 per test.
As to the prior art -- I thought the same thing. Academic scientists always publish anything useful, and if it was published, it would be prior art.
You can find the actual patent numbers in their 10-K form if anybody wants to look it up. http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9Mzc2ODQxfENoaWxkSUQ9Mzc1NTU2fFR5cGU9MQ==&t=1
I wonder how much of this research was done with U.S. government funding, which would have made it unpatentable until the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980.
So what you are saying is that because certain legal cases support this principle, that makes it the law?
Yes, that's the way the law works. U.S. law is derived from English law, and English law is based on the development of legal cases over time. In the U.S., judges additionally have to interpret the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, which applies here.
You just have to understand the law. Go to the library and look up a book on introduction to the law.
On this point, you can read the book, Bramble Bush: On Our Law and Its Study, by Karl Nickerson Llewellyn.
Separation of power means that the judiciary can strike down laws if they violate the Constitution, which is the highest law.
The legislature is one power. They pass laws. The judiciary is a separate power. They strike down laws if they violate the Constitution.
Do you think it's possible to make Louisiana "whole" if the oil spill hits the wetlands?
I don't. Prince William Sound never recovered from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill#Cleanup_measures_and_environmental_consequences
The oil companies pay "restitution" at a deep discount.
We don't know what all the damage is. The oil companies only pay for the damage we know about. So they get off free for all the damage we don't know about.
And you can't quantify some damages. When I go to New Orleans, I used to see the birds. Now I might not. What's the value of that? How much should BP compensate me? Do I get a voucher for $20 that I can use to watch wildlife documentaries instead?
These environmental catastrophes don't destroy the inefficient, incompetent companies. The last company I heard of that was destroyed because of its incompetence was Johns-Manville, the asbestos company that knew according to confidential company memos that its asbestos was killing people but didn't tell its customers. (In France, the executives would have gone to jail.) They were hit with a lot of product liability suits and went bankrupt. Now they're back in business. Suppose you get mesothelioma, which means you're going to die at age 45 rather than age 75. You sue the asbestos company and get $3 million. Does that make you whole? No, you're still dead. Maybe you would be happy to die if you got $30 million instead. But you can only get so much money out of the asbestos companies, because they're bankrupt.
Conclusion: You can't make people whole after they're harmed. In fact, the threat of massive damages doesn't even deter companies from taking risks that will harm the population. You can only prevent harm beforehand, by having the government regulate dangerous industries. If you cut government regulations, like Bush (and now Obama) did, you're going to have disasters, and the companies responsible can't make the victims whole.