If you cause a death through your negligence that is manslaughter. It is the same charge levied at a drunk driver that gets into an accident and causes a death. If it weren't accident it would be murder.
Personally I think manslaughter and similar charges should require evidence of some sort of willful malice and not mere negligence. Usually that should be tied to an incentive, like profit or political gain. The other uses of this charge are just to make sure a head rolls to satisfy grieving family who are calling for blood and that is vengeance not justice misplaced vengeance at that. Sometimes shit happens and just because it is someone's fault doesn't make that someone a danger to society. Punishment should be to deter future crime not for vengeance.
There are industry best practices. If the instructor followed them and something happened anyway then yes absolutely he should be excused. The same is true of a doctor who assures the family things are going to be okay because the odds strongly favor that outcome for a routine procedure and then the patient has an unusual complication.
Sometimes, shit happens.
If incompetence is at work then firing is appropriate. Prosecution shouldn't even be on the table unless there is evidence to support actual malice. Negligence can be the result of either of the above depending on whether it was willful or not and should be punished accordingly.
In general, charges like manslaughter are over used to punish people who made stupid mistakes that happened to lead to big consequences. The charge exists more for the purpose of making people feel like something was done than to actually make society any safer.
So libertarians are opposed to the constitution? The constitution doesn't allow congress to make laws that affect religion because any such law would bar extreme religious practices (the reason most early settlers came here) like those of the puritans. Therefore, congress lacks the authority to tax churches or stop underage drinking in churches.
This pisses the IRS off to no end and they ignore their lack of authority over churches and make statutes regarding them anyway with varied degrees of success in their illegal enforcement.
While HTML is handy and so is some economics they aren't even in the same ballpark as chemistry.
High school chemistry is currently taught as preparation for college chemistry. It's probably more efficient to make a mandatory high school chemistry course a mostly lab based introduction to simple chemical processes and processes related to chemistry that are useful in daily life and require the much smaller subset that are going on to college chemistry to make due with learning the same material taught in high school chemistry now when it is taught in college.
For example, you can go quite far into measurement, dilution, filtration and extraction, desiccants, distillation, chemical batteries, oxidation, and basic acid/base extractions without more than a cursory understanding of what is going on under the hood and you certainly don't need to even see a chemical equation in learning that.
Most of that is covered in high school chemistry now but the classes are so heavily based in theory that students can't recognize the opportunities to use that information that are all around them. This is true of many subjects in school.
Your entire post could be dismissed as ad hominem. Which practice did I advocate that reduces readability, takes longer to write, or betrays a lack of familiarity with modern compiler design. Certainly not using pointers and avoiding copies in data structures. You can do that as you write without expending additional time or effort, the result is no more or less readable, and compilers modern or not, don't do it for you.
That quote is about micro-optimization. Trying to avoid a single variable, not using a profiler to identify critical loops, not focusing more on an efficient overall structure, etc. None of that justifies not knowing what is happening underneath the surface of your code. As for modern compilers, which compiler? Which OS? Which language? Can I count on my Perl code working the same way as my C code? Well I certainly can but given your assertion I doubt you can.
"The Brits extended their territorial waters to include the platform without recognizing his sovereignty"
The United States and Russia do the same to one another in the Arctic. A lot of nations claim territory in a manner that is contrary to treaty and international law. That doesn't negate the sovereignty of the nation they take it from.
Under international law it was too late for the UK to take territory from Sealand. For the past 40 years the UK has failed to attack Sealand despite forming plans to do the same. The reason is presumably the same as it was when they aborted the plan (outlined in official government documents that were declassified) which is that they feared loss of life. In other words, Sealand possessed enough arms to make the cost too high to take it. You could argue that if Sealand became some sort of threat or too juicy a target that would tip the scales and the UK would take it back but that is true of many nations. Look at Canada or Mexico and the US. They are bigger than Sealand but the US military could probably take either without even needing extra funding for the task and would do so if it felt it either was a threat or offered a worthwhile advantage relative to the political, financial, and human costs.
That was one of your points. I didn't disagree with your other point that there is nowhere for a micro-nation to spring up. However, I think you are dismissing quite a few places where man made land could be placed. There is far more water on Earth than land. You could toss up your nation in the open waters of the Pacific or the Atlantic. If you put your nation in a strategic location where it could provide a port for ships along trade lanes and a duty free zone you might well find that rather than tripping over each other to crush your nation they would be tripping over each other to not only recognize you but even to provide aid. Another possibility is a group of refuges from communism or Christians wanting to live according to some fundie version of god's law. Any of the above who make it clear they are friendly and want peaceful relations with all nations on a public forum, especially if they contact political embassies. I'd contact nations via their smallest and slowest embassies. That way you reach official and empowered representatives of the nation who are bored and don't have much else to do.
I have no substantiated information on what type of vessel was used in the attack and doubt you do either. It doesn't really matter though UK government documents make clear the Prime Minister made the choice not to take the tower by force due the cost in resources and life.
"British Government documents, now available to the public under the 30-year expiry of confidentiality, show that the UK drafted plans to take the tower by force, but such plans were not implemented by the then Prime Minister due to the potential for loss of life, and the creation of a legal and public relations disaster."
So clearly the British feel its defenses are sufficient. The subsequent defenses against privateers indicate the same. It is no different than computer security. Anything is hackable, the question is really whether or not your defenses are substantial enough to make attacking you not worth it. Thus the argument is made regardless of what type of craft he fired at.
You didn't claim some the guns were dismantled but some AC replied indicating as much claiming the British removed the weapons from all the forts long before. He pulled the idea out of his backside. Here is an image of Sealand. You can clearly see some of the guns from this vantage. These forts were armed with "3.75-inch guns and two 40 mm Bofors guns."
You can read an abbreviated version of the story here http://www.sealandgov.org/history under the heading "Initial Challenge to Sealand's Sovereignty."
Any other 100% fabricated stories you want to make up about what the British did?
Being attacked by the Bolivian navy would have been the fast track to political recognition. The British would have allied with Sealand faster than you could imagine and everyone would have followed.
Recognition from the British was two-fold and neither of them an error. A court decision (the court decision is the final say on what is error and therefore by definition never an error itself) and by the PM when he called for the British forces to retreat from their naval attack on the platform.
"Sealand would have been done for if they'd simply blockaded him."
The same reason they couldn't conquer Sealand when they tried is the reason they would never had done this. Blockading Sealand effectively would have cost a great deal in terms of resources and manpower. Attacking would have been the same.
Being small and not worth the cost of taking doesn't make your micronation in invalid. Sealand is legit and while the British haven't recognized it politically the courts have acknowledge it is not British territory and therefore technically it is less correct to call it HM Fort Roughs than Sealand. Perhaps the platform formerly known as HM Fort Roughs?
The Brits send the royal navy to take Sealand. The cops would likely have the same problem they did, namely armed guards and the military deck guns. Sealand was a military base and when taken still had arms intact.
Unless you have enough arms, ammunition, fuel, etc to make conquering you more expensive than its worth. Sealand did, that is why it successfully repelled the British navy when it attacked.
Sealand defended the platform against the British navy successful. He was trying to set the required military strength bar at some arbitrary point higher than that possessed by Sealand and failed due to ignorance. Sealand didn't have much of a military but had guns and forces sufficient for defending a tiny cement platform with no natural resources.
The amount of military you need isn't defined by the size of the enemy but the amount of resources the enemy is willing to commit and that in turn is in no small part defined by what you are defending.
No I think he cuts right to the point. You need enough force to repel attackers and attackers are only going to invest an amount that makes sense given the target. The British attempted to reclaim the platform and were deterred by the deck guns.
There are no shortage of recognized nations that don't possess a military that could provide any sort of serious challenge to the British.
Doubtful, it would take a lot of resources to blockade it. At the end of the day it isn't about how much military can be fit around the platform but about how many resources it is worth expending to take the territory. Trident missiles and nuclear weapons are very very expensive; in the case of a nuke you are also talking about serious ecological consequences in British waters. Also anything launched on a missile could potentially be shot out of the air by the anti-aircraft. Sending someone close to the platform means risking not only equipment but lives.
No sane person would sanction a blockade that costs more tax dollars than any potential taxes that could be collected.
Sealand was brilliant. It was built as a naval base so the British navy had the opinion that the platform could do more damage to attackers than the platform itself was worth from the start. If it weren't they either would have adjusted the firepower put on the platform or not built it.
"Your nation is only as strong as your ability to defend it."
True.
"If you're going to declare independence, you're going to need an army that's as least as strong as the army of the country you're declaring independence from."
False. You only need an army that is strong enough to cause more damage than taking your nation is worth. That is far less for a tiny island, oil rig, or abandoned naval base than for massive island with billions in natural resources like Britain.
Prince Roy actually had that. If you bothered actually looking into the history of Sealand instead of making instant unfounded decisions about people you'd discover that the British navy attempted to reclaim Sealand. When he fired a single warning shot from the guns the British decided it wasn't worth the potential loss of life required to take the base to reclaim it. At that point, they officially gave ended their unprovoked war of aggression against the island nation of Sealand.
Of course, it was a given that it would be trivial to refute an argument from a moron who labels entire groups of people and declares them to all be morons. Only a moron could thing that everyone who reaches different political conclusions than they do is a moron.
He claimed abandoned territory in international waters. That isn't treason by any definition I've heard.
As far as I know he was left alone because the PM was afraid people would die trying to take it back from him and the courts later ruled it was not British territory. I suppose you could make the argument that the warning shot he fired at the ships was treason? But history is written by victor and he won the battle with the British forces surrendering and ending their unprovoked act of aggression against Sealand.
You shouldn't assume a compiler is going to do something for you unless that something an optimization you are specifically turning on. Even then it is bad practice. If you write your code in an optimal way it will be optimal everywhere regardless of compiler or compiler version. Of course at a certain point you need it even more optimal than that, then you should be writing it in ASM in the first place.
And your code in the language where you don't explicitly mange them is going to be using them underneath in some places and understanding where those places are is going to result in the code written in that language running much faster.
You shouldn't be doing higher level programming if you don't have a general understanding of the code what you are writing is going to turn into.
He might think he should be in charge. A lot of shareholders in Disney are disney fans and might be inclined to agree. See the "Save Disney" campaigns by his nephew http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_E._Disney for examples of Disney family members frustrating the board by rallying shareholders.
The poor don't pay taxes either and they get healthcare in Britain. Seems to me the Brits would first have to acknowledge the independence of Sealand before they could debate denying him healthcare.
If you are interested in freedom, of the variety that conflicts with current nations tagging and tracking of all their citizens, then you undoubtedly find micronations to be of interest.
Yes, I noted the rhetoric that tried to equate non-manufacturer airbags with faulty airbags. There is no particular reason third party airbags have to be faulty and this seems to be drumming up support for tighter protections for manufacturer supplied airbags. The government is already urging people to get airbags from the dealer.
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If you cause a death through your negligence that is manslaughter. It is the same charge levied at a drunk driver that gets into an accident and causes a death. If it weren't accident it would be murder.
Personally I think manslaughter and similar charges should require evidence of some sort of willful malice and not mere negligence. Usually that should be tied to an incentive, like profit or political gain. The other uses of this charge are just to make sure a head rolls to satisfy grieving family who are calling for blood and that is vengeance not justice misplaced vengeance at that. Sometimes shit happens and just because it is someone's fault doesn't make that someone a danger to society. Punishment should be to deter future crime not for vengeance.
There are industry best practices. If the instructor followed them and something happened anyway then yes absolutely he should be excused. The same is true of a doctor who assures the family things are going to be okay because the odds strongly favor that outcome for a routine procedure and then the patient has an unusual complication.
Sometimes, shit happens.
If incompetence is at work then firing is appropriate. Prosecution shouldn't even be on the table unless there is evidence to support actual malice. Negligence can be the result of either of the above depending on whether it was willful or not and should be punished accordingly.
In general, charges like manslaughter are over used to punish people who made stupid mistakes that happened to lead to big consequences. The charge exists more for the purpose of making people feel like something was done than to actually make society any safer.
"special tax breaks for religious institutions"
So libertarians are opposed to the constitution? The constitution doesn't allow congress to make laws that affect religion because any such law would bar extreme religious practices (the reason most early settlers came here) like those of the puritans. Therefore, congress lacks the authority to tax churches or stop underage drinking in churches.
This pisses the IRS off to no end and they ignore their lack of authority over churches and make statutes regarding them anyway with varied degrees of success in their illegal enforcement.
While HTML is handy and so is some economics they aren't even in the same ballpark as chemistry.
High school chemistry is currently taught as preparation for college chemistry. It's probably more efficient to make a mandatory high school chemistry course a mostly lab based introduction to simple chemical processes and processes related to chemistry that are useful in daily life and require the much smaller subset that are going on to college chemistry to make due with learning the same material taught in high school chemistry now when it is taught in college.
For example, you can go quite far into measurement, dilution, filtration and extraction, desiccants, distillation, chemical batteries, oxidation, and basic acid/base extractions without more than a cursory understanding of what is going on under the hood and you certainly don't need to even see a chemical equation in learning that.
Most of that is covered in high school chemistry now but the classes are so heavily based in theory that students can't recognize the opportunities to use that information that are all around them. This is true of many subjects in school.
Your entire post could be dismissed as ad hominem. Which practice did I advocate that reduces readability, takes longer to write, or betrays a lack of familiarity with modern compiler design. Certainly not using pointers and avoiding copies in data structures. You can do that as you write without expending additional time or effort, the result is no more or less readable, and compilers modern or not, don't do it for you.
That quote is about micro-optimization. Trying to avoid a single variable, not using a profiler to identify critical loops, not focusing more on an efficient overall structure, etc. None of that justifies not knowing what is happening underneath the surface of your code. As for modern compilers, which compiler? Which OS? Which language? Can I count on my Perl code working the same way as my C code? Well I certainly can but given your assertion I doubt you can.
"The Brits extended their territorial waters to include the platform without recognizing his sovereignty"
The United States and Russia do the same to one another in the Arctic. A lot of nations claim territory in a manner that is contrary to treaty and international law. That doesn't negate the sovereignty of the nation they take it from.
Under international law it was too late for the UK to take territory from Sealand. For the past 40 years the UK has failed to attack Sealand despite forming plans to do the same. The reason is presumably the same as it was when they aborted the plan (outlined in official government documents that were declassified) which is that they feared loss of life. In other words, Sealand possessed enough arms to make the cost too high to take it. You could argue that if Sealand became some sort of threat or too juicy a target that would tip the scales and the UK would take it back but that is true of many nations. Look at Canada or Mexico and the US. They are bigger than Sealand but the US military could probably take either without even needing extra funding for the task and would do so if it felt it either was a threat or offered a worthwhile advantage relative to the political, financial, and human costs.
That was one of your points. I didn't disagree with your other point that there is nowhere for a micro-nation to spring up. However, I think you are dismissing quite a few places where man made land could be placed. There is far more water on Earth than land. You could toss up your nation in the open waters of the Pacific or the Atlantic. If you put your nation in a strategic location where it could provide a port for ships along trade lanes and a duty free zone you might well find that rather than tripping over each other to crush your nation they would be tripping over each other to not only recognize you but even to provide aid. Another possibility is a group of refuges from communism or Christians wanting to live according to some fundie version of god's law. Any of the above who make it clear they are friendly and want peaceful relations with all nations on a public forum, especially if they contact political embassies. I'd contact nations via their smallest and slowest embassies. That way you reach official and empowered representatives of the nation who are bored and don't have much else to do.
I have no substantiated information on what type of vessel was used in the attack and doubt you do either. It doesn't really matter though UK government documents make clear the Prime Minister made the choice not to take the tower by force due the cost in resources and life.
From http://micronations.wikia.com/wiki/Sealand:
"British Government documents, now available to the public under the 30-year expiry of confidentiality, show that the UK drafted plans to take the tower by force, but such plans were not implemented by the then Prime Minister due to the potential for loss of life, and the creation of a legal and public relations disaster."
So clearly the British feel its defenses are sufficient. The subsequent defenses against privateers indicate the same. It is no different than computer security. Anything is hackable, the question is really whether or not your defenses are substantial enough to make attacking you not worth it. Thus the argument is made regardless of what type of craft he fired at.
You didn't claim some the guns were dismantled but some AC replied indicating as much claiming the British removed the weapons from all the forts long before. He pulled the idea out of his backside. Here is an image of Sealand. You can clearly see some of the guns from this vantage. These forts were armed with "3.75-inch guns and two 40 mm Bofors guns."
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Sealand-sky.jpg
You must not have read much. Were you the one who deleted the relevant section from the Wikipedia page? You forgot to delete the picture.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Sealand-sky.jpg
That pointy thing near the crane is a deck gun.
You can read an abbreviated version of the story here http://www.sealandgov.org/history under the heading "Initial Challenge to Sealand's Sovereignty."
Any other 100% fabricated stories you want to make up about what the British did?
Being attacked by the Bolivian navy would have been the fast track to political recognition. The British would have allied with Sealand faster than you could imagine and everyone would have followed.
Recognition from the British was two-fold and neither of them an error. A court decision (the court decision is the final say on what is error and therefore by definition never an error itself) and by the PM when he called for the British forces to retreat from their naval attack on the platform.
"Sealand would have been done for if they'd simply blockaded him."
The same reason they couldn't conquer Sealand when they tried is the reason they would never had done this. Blockading Sealand effectively would have cost a great deal in terms of resources and manpower. Attacking would have been the same.
Being small and not worth the cost of taking doesn't make your micronation in invalid. Sealand is legit and while the British haven't recognized it politically the courts have acknowledge it is not British territory and therefore technically it is less correct to call it HM Fort Roughs than Sealand. Perhaps the platform formerly known as HM Fort Roughs?
The Brits send the royal navy to take Sealand. The cops would likely have the same problem they did, namely armed guards and the military deck guns. Sealand was a military base and when taken still had arms intact.
Unless you have enough arms, ammunition, fuel, etc to make conquering you more expensive than its worth. Sealand did, that is why it successfully repelled the British navy when it attacked.
Sealand defended the platform against the British navy successful. He was trying to set the required military strength bar at some arbitrary point higher than that possessed by Sealand and failed due to ignorance. Sealand didn't have much of a military but had guns and forces sufficient for defending a tiny cement platform with no natural resources.
The amount of military you need isn't defined by the size of the enemy but the amount of resources the enemy is willing to commit and that in turn is in no small part defined by what you are defending.
No I think he cuts right to the point. You need enough force to repel attackers and attackers are only going to invest an amount that makes sense given the target. The British attempted to reclaim the platform and were deterred by the deck guns.
There are no shortage of recognized nations that don't possess a military that could provide any sort of serious challenge to the British.
Doubtful, it would take a lot of resources to blockade it. At the end of the day it isn't about how much military can be fit around the platform but about how many resources it is worth expending to take the territory. Trident missiles and nuclear weapons are very very expensive; in the case of a nuke you are also talking about serious ecological consequences in British waters. Also anything launched on a missile could potentially be shot out of the air by the anti-aircraft. Sending someone close to the platform means risking not only equipment but lives.
No sane person would sanction a blockade that costs more tax dollars than any potential taxes that could be collected.
Sealand was brilliant. It was built as a naval base so the British navy had the opinion that the platform could do more damage to attackers than the platform itself was worth from the start. If it weren't they either would have adjusted the firepower put on the platform or not built it.
"Your nation is only as strong as your ability to defend it."
True.
"If you're going to declare independence, you're going to need an army that's as least as strong as the army of the country you're declaring independence from."
False. You only need an army that is strong enough to cause more damage than taking your nation is worth. That is far less for a tiny island, oil rig, or abandoned naval base than for massive island with billions in natural resources like Britain.
Prince Roy actually had that. If you bothered actually looking into the history of Sealand instead of making instant unfounded decisions about people you'd discover that the British navy attempted to reclaim Sealand. When he fired a single warning shot from the guns the British decided it wasn't worth the potential loss of life required to take the base to reclaim it. At that point, they officially gave ended their unprovoked war of aggression against the island nation of Sealand.
Of course, it was a given that it would be trivial to refute an argument from a moron who labels entire groups of people and declares them to all be morons. Only a moron could thing that everyone who reaches different political conclusions than they do is a moron.
He claimed abandoned territory in international waters. That isn't treason by any definition I've heard.
As far as I know he was left alone because the PM was afraid people would die trying to take it back from him and the courts later ruled it was not British territory. I suppose you could make the argument that the warning shot he fired at the ships was treason? But history is written by victor and he won the battle with the British forces surrendering and ending their unprovoked act of aggression against Sealand.
You shouldn't assume a compiler is going to do something for you unless that something an optimization you are specifically turning on. Even then it is bad practice. If you write your code in an optimal way it will be optimal everywhere regardless of compiler or compiler version. Of course at a certain point you need it even more optimal than that, then you should be writing it in ASM in the first place.
And your code in the language where you don't explicitly mange them is going to be using them underneath in some places and understanding where those places are is going to result in the code written in that language running much faster.
You shouldn't be doing higher level programming if you don't have a general understanding of the code what you are writing is going to turn into.
He might think he should be in charge. A lot of shareholders in Disney are disney fans and might be inclined to agree. See the "Save Disney" campaigns by his nephew http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_E._Disney for examples of Disney family members frustrating the board by rallying shareholders.
The poor don't pay taxes either and they get healthcare in Britain. Seems to me the Brits would first have to acknowledge the independence of Sealand before they could debate denying him healthcare.
I think you mean prince. It's a principality not a kingdom.
If you are interested in freedom, of the variety that conflicts with current nations tagging and tracking of all their citizens, then you undoubtedly find micronations to be of interest.
Yes, I noted the rhetoric that tried to equate non-manufacturer airbags with faulty airbags. There is no particular reason third party airbags have to be faulty and this seems to be drumming up support for tighter protections for manufacturer supplied airbags. The government is already urging people to get airbags from the dealer.