Might work better if there were an equivalent to the IIHS and their crash-testing. IIHS is not a government agency, but their testing regimen, far more advanced than NHTSA's, shames automakers into doing the right thing.
Unfortunately there's no, "Wow!" factor with fuel economy testing, compared to fairly spectacular results from IIHS's efforts.
You may jest, but back when Chrysler was very seriously contemplating buying Mitsubishi they shifted badge-engineered production from Asia to North America. All of those Galants and Eclipses were made in the USA in the Diamond-Star Motors plant, along with the two-door versions of the Avenger, Sebring, and Stratus.
Chrysler eventually did not choose to buy Mitsubishi, and at some later date Mitsubishi bought-out Chrysler's stake in DSM.
Which is a good thing. The subsequent generations of unmanned aircraft will outperform at levels that human piloted aircraft never could. They will be smaller, more agile, capable of higher-G maneuvers, and vastly cheaper. They will have vastly superior response times and less susceptible to pilot-error.
They also won't be able to make judgement-calls to not engage a target.
Remember, while humans have the capacity to do terrible things to each other, humans also have the capacity to defy orders to to terrible things to each other. Removing a layer of humanity further concentrates terrible lethal power in fewer and fewer hands.
Of course Brevik's reasons are probably those of an insane man. But executing people for the result of insanity is even less humane than executing them as retribution.
It is not if one uses a result-based approach. He killed, what, 77 people, intentionally? it really doesn't if insanity was the cause of his choice or not, the ramifications of his choices, the result of his actions, is what matters. And that is that he intentionally killed 77 people.
And the phrase "putting animals to sleep" is another falsehood that doesn't belong in a debate on executions. The animals aren't put to sleep, they are killed. Using euphemisms suggests wooly thinking.
Cull. Kill. Execute. To be honest I don't care what you call it. In this circumstance, the intentional ending of a human life is justified.
You'll note that I specifically want capital punishment to be reserved for particularly egregious homicide cases. I can't think of a single society or religion that endorses homicide among private individuals without very specific reasons. If the bar is set even at common examples of homicide then your entire argument is negated.
Which is why I approach the matter as one would approach a dog that mauls people without cause. The dog is put-down if it attacks people, because we're concerned with what that dog will do to people based on its previous behavior. We generally don't put-down dogs that have a single incident unless that single incident is pretty debilitating to the victim, but we do put down dogs that either cause greivous harm, death, or have a pattern of attacks. We cannot tolerate the behavior ever happening again, so we euphemistically, "put the dog to sleep." We don't shoot the dog, we don't paralyze the dog before putting in the killing-drug, we don't gas the dog with something that will cause the dog to experience liquid filling the lungs before death, we don't shock the dog. We either gas the dog with something that displaces oxygen so it dies quickly and relatively painlessly, or we inject a drug cocktail that puts the dog under as it stops essential heart and lung involuntary responses so that the dog dies.
Mr. Breivik's actions, that he was proud of carrying out, are worthy of being, "put to sleep." We don't do this out of retribution, we do this because this individual is too great a threat to be allowed to live.
Execution is more expensive only because of the nature of how Death Row is run in the United States, and how appeals processes are handled.
Running the court proceedings is expensive. Running the court appeals process is expensive. Judges and lawyers for both sides cost a lot of money if they're any good at their jobs. Now, figure that there are probably 20 people working to support the judge, and possibly a half-dozen for each attorney for capital crimes.
Part of what makes it so damn expensive is that the appeals process is necessary because too many people are sentenced to die without overwhelming evidence, and a lot of people either have their sentences reduced or are exonerated entirely after their original convictions. Stop overusing the death penalty and it would probably cost less to use, since you would have much more ironclad convictions, so the appeals process wouldn't have to take as long as it does or to cost as much.
American Motors couldn't manufacture a transmission to save their lives. They bought them straight from Borg-Warner or from Chrysler. They struggled with engines. They bought a LOT of GM engines, to the point that between engine and transmission combinations it's possible to bolt certain Chrysler 904 Torqueflites to certain small GM engines directly, as the bellhousings match because of AMC.
These days, companies like Morgan in the UK buy their engines from other car companies. They use a BMW-sourced engine for their conventional cars, and an American V-twin originally designed as a Harley-Davidson replacement engine on their venerable Three Wheeler, and both types use third party transmissions, like the Miata transmission used in the Three Wheeler.
Even the "big three" did this. Nearly all steering columns in Ford, GM, and Chrysler products were Saginaw. GM and Mopar both used Saginaw power steering pumps and gearboxes. Ford used their own and you can tell based on the whine they make. Sometimes it's better to use someone else's parts bin if those parts are well proven.
It's also likely, given that Tesla is a lot more of a premium brand than Ford's sales-bulk, that they'll evaluate what technologies Tesla used and why to figure out how to decontent a vehicle enough to fit their market segment. This is actually a good thing for bringing electric vehicles to the masses, as most of us cannot afford a Model S or Model X, and even a lot of people can't or probably shouldn't try to afford a Model 3.
Franchise dealers make their profits on service, not on sales. I am a member of a local car club that meets at a major dealership, and the direct owner of the dealership has addressed the club several times. One time he talked about the finance of running a dealership. They pay their mortgage on the land and buildings, their maintenance of the facility, their staffing, their utilities, and all of their other expensses, and still make a profit on their service.
Dealers may make a profit on sales, but their purpose is to make a profit on service.
But you've failed to deal with all the other arguments against the death penalty.
For a start, execution is more expensive than long-term imprisonment. (If you doubt this, do some reading.)
I am not calling for this for a cost savings. I am calling for an executing for someone like this because the real danger the individual poses outweighs everything else.
Executing nutters like this doesn't act as an effective deterrent, as crazies can't be deterred.
Again, I am not calling for executing this person because of a deterrence effect. I am calling for this person's execution because of the real proven danger this person presents.
There's also the issue of accidentally killing the wrong person, which is always a risk with the death penalty, but admittedly doesn't seem like much of an issue in a case like this.
Exactly, it is not a danger in a case like this. As far as I am concerned, it would be acceptable for the issue of execution to be forwarded up to higher courts in a given nation. The court under which the convict was originally tried is probably not as-able to determine the sentence. Have an intermediate court review the conviction without a specified sentence to determine if the convict's special circumstances warrant execution or not. Choose to recommend, and auto-appeal this to the high court for final decision. Then let a combination of the prosecution and law enforcement make requests to determine when the execution will occur, based on any other pending cases, and then schedule it. If either court finds against execution, the original court proceeds to conventional sentencing.
Spree killers and serial killers would basically be the only parties for whom this would apply. The killer either needs to kill more than one person in short order, or needs to kill more than one person over time.
He his human. A human murdered those people. You are literally de-humanizing him because you don't want to accept the fact that another human, much like yourself, committed horrible crimes. He deserves to be treated like a human. That's the difference between us and his victims.
See, while he's homo sapiens, there's a point when the monstrosity of the crime committed, coupled with the complete lack of doubt that he was the perpetrator, is why I do not support ridding the world of the death penalty. I don't want that penalty to be one of retribution though, I want such a penalty to be akin to putting animals to sleep.
I don't necessarily support the death penalty for one-time murderers, especially those who personally knew the victim, as there are cases when the homicide committed was essentially the final step in a series of escalating events by both people. Such a murderer is probably not going to kill anyone again as the circumstances that led to the murder were extraordinary.
I am much more in favor of the death penalty as an option when the murderer kills people that are unknown to them, or are little more than casual acquaintances. That shows a person that's willing to kill for no reason, rather than at least having a reason like in my previous example. Someone willing to kill for no reason once may well be willing to kill for no reason again.
Yes, a lot of startups sell-out to other companies, but so far that doesn't seem to be Musk's style. On top of that Tesla is poised to grow exponentially without having to be purchased by another company. Tesla is generally doing things that most of the other companies don't want to do or haven't figured out how to do, there's not a lot of reason for them to want to be bought.
It depends on what they did with the knowledge that they acquired.
One of the most important cases was when Compaq used one team to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS in 1982 or so, then another team to take the documentation that the first team created in order to implement a new BIOS to the same specifications wtihout actually looking at the IBM product.
If Ford takes apart the Tesla, documents the kinds of welds, the kinds of materials, the kinds of battery chemistries, and a bunch of other relevant stuff, then passes that information to another team to design a car using those technologies, with the automaker's patent lawyers involved to help avoid treading where they shouldn't, then they're probably good.
Also bear in mind that Musk has made public statements about letting others use his patents. Could be that Ford is protected, to an extent, but such a well-documented public declaration, at least for Tesla patents at the time that Musk made the assertion.
My college library system was organized across at least three libraries, and the only tell which library held a given subset of the collection was the LOC number. It was common to go looking for something, walking through the stacks, to find that LOC numbers skipped, meaning, wrong building. Dammit.
As one of those born-before-1990 people, you were still limited to the editorial choices made by your librarian or library staff, or the city-council or schoolboard or college board that made policy decisions affecting the library. It was also difficult to evaluate the worthiness of the book itself, there were not as many sources to use to find out if the author was truly an expert in the subject or if the author was pushing an agenda that ran toward fringe/junk science.
Then there was the time-element. It simply took a long time to peruse the material. It was often not possible to search the text of the book to find something relevant, one had to hope that the author and editor did their jobs well and organized chapters and subjects in a logical fashion.
Don't get me wrong, there are still a lot of veracity problems with modern Internet-based techniques, and there are still problems with junk work and authors masquerading as legitimate that are merely trying to push an agenda, but it's a lot easier than it used to be to get to that part of evaluating the work, instead of spending so much time just trying to find the works in the first place.
But the person on the ad was not calling anyone "Ghetto"...she said the word to describe T-Mobile, a competitor, was Ghetto.
I'm trying to figure out how they thought it would be beneficial to them to say this in the first place.
Cellular companies are just service providers. If a cheaper service provider meets the customer's needs then why would the customer spend more money than necessary?
Insulting another company through pejoratives that don't have a technical meaning probably does more to galvanize that company's subscribers against the person making the statement than it does to solicit those subscribers, as it is basically an insult to the customers too.
This is news for nerds because first, it took a nerd to find it (most people don't have the ability to check where a device is attempting to open ports to) and because it's more news of a pre-hacked piece of equipment that most people would trust to be secure out-of-the-box from arguably the largest retailer in the world. If this was fulfilled by Amazon then it's more evidence that Amazon needs to do more quality control when they agree to stock something. They need at least SQCs and if it's widespread enough, SQEs to do this kind of random-lot testing.
I know you're being silly on purpose, but would a true randomizing device really be necessary? Human traffic patterns already have such a random element to them that even if one somehow could reliably predict the next number in the software algorithm, there are so many other factors that can't be controlled that it's still essentially random anyway.
I honestly could see it being in the low five-figures to develop such an application, but that money would mostly be applied to figuring out how to design the user-interface of the application such that it best-fits with how the TSA is *supposed* to operate, and in beta-testing to confirm that it does what it's supposed to do and that any untrained TSA agent down to the junior-assistant-trainee who breathes with his mouth open could use it and understand it, but mid-six-figures is pretty ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Might work better if there were an equivalent to the IIHS and their crash-testing. IIHS is not a government agency, but their testing regimen, far more advanced than NHTSA's, shames automakers into doing the right thing.
Unfortunately there's no, "Wow!" factor with fuel economy testing, compared to fairly spectacular results from IIHS's efforts.
Even when the Japanese do it?
You may jest, but back when Chrysler was very seriously contemplating buying Mitsubishi they shifted badge-engineered production from Asia to North America. All of those Galants and Eclipses were made in the USA in the Diamond-Star Motors plant, along with the two-door versions of the Avenger, Sebring, and Stratus.
Chrysler eventually did not choose to buy Mitsubishi, and at some later date Mitsubishi bought-out Chrysler's stake in DSM.
Which is a good thing. The subsequent generations of unmanned aircraft will outperform at levels that human piloted aircraft never could. They will be smaller, more agile, capable of higher-G maneuvers, and vastly cheaper. They will have vastly superior response times and less susceptible to pilot-error.
They also won't be able to make judgement-calls to not engage a target.
Remember, while humans have the capacity to do terrible things to each other, humans also have the capacity to defy orders to to terrible things to each other. Removing a layer of humanity further concentrates terrible lethal power in fewer and fewer hands.
Of course Brevik's reasons are probably those of an insane man. But executing people for the result of insanity is even less humane than executing them as retribution.
It is not if one uses a result-based approach. He killed, what, 77 people, intentionally? it really doesn't if insanity was the cause of his choice or not, the ramifications of his choices, the result of his actions, is what matters. And that is that he intentionally killed 77 people.
And the phrase "putting animals to sleep" is another falsehood that doesn't belong in a debate on executions. The animals aren't put to sleep, they are killed. Using euphemisms suggests wooly thinking.
Cull. Kill. Execute. To be honest I don't care what you call it. In this circumstance, the intentional ending of a human life is justified.
I've heard the term, "slushbox," applied to any hydraulic automatic transmission, it's not limited to a particular one.
You'll note that I specifically want capital punishment to be reserved for particularly egregious homicide cases. I can't think of a single society or religion that endorses homicide among private individuals without very specific reasons. If the bar is set even at common examples of homicide then your entire argument is negated.
Which is why I approach the matter as one would approach a dog that mauls people without cause. The dog is put-down if it attacks people, because we're concerned with what that dog will do to people based on its previous behavior. We generally don't put-down dogs that have a single incident unless that single incident is pretty debilitating to the victim, but we do put down dogs that either cause greivous harm, death, or have a pattern of attacks. We cannot tolerate the behavior ever happening again, so we euphemistically, "put the dog to sleep." We don't shoot the dog, we don't paralyze the dog before putting in the killing-drug, we don't gas the dog with something that will cause the dog to experience liquid filling the lungs before death, we don't shock the dog. We either gas the dog with something that displaces oxygen so it dies quickly and relatively painlessly, or we inject a drug cocktail that puts the dog under as it stops essential heart and lung involuntary responses so that the dog dies.
Mr. Breivik's actions, that he was proud of carrying out, are worthy of being, "put to sleep." We don't do this out of retribution, we do this because this individual is too great a threat to be allowed to live.
People can give-up their rights. One can argue that the taking of the life of another waves one's own right to life.
Execution is more expensive only because of the nature of how Death Row is run in the United States, and how appeals processes are handled.
Running the court proceedings is expensive. Running the court appeals process is expensive. Judges and lawyers for both sides cost a lot of money if they're any good at their jobs. Now, figure that there are probably 20 people working to support the judge, and possibly a half-dozen for each attorney for capital crimes.
Part of what makes it so damn expensive is that the appeals process is necessary because too many people are sentenced to die without overwhelming evidence, and a lot of people either have their sentences reduced or are exonerated entirely after their original convictions. Stop overusing the death penalty and it would probably cost less to use, since you would have much more ironclad convictions, so the appeals process wouldn't have to take as long as it does or to cost as much.
American Motors couldn't manufacture a transmission to save their lives. They bought them straight from Borg-Warner or from Chrysler. They struggled with engines. They bought a LOT of GM engines, to the point that between engine and transmission combinations it's possible to bolt certain Chrysler 904 Torqueflites to certain small GM engines directly, as the bellhousings match because of AMC.
These days, companies like Morgan in the UK buy their engines from other car companies. They use a BMW-sourced engine for their conventional cars, and an American V-twin originally designed as a Harley-Davidson replacement engine on their venerable Three Wheeler, and both types use third party transmissions, like the Miata transmission used in the Three Wheeler.
Even the "big three" did this. Nearly all steering columns in Ford, GM, and Chrysler products were Saginaw. GM and Mopar both used Saginaw power steering pumps and gearboxes. Ford used their own and you can tell based on the whine they make. Sometimes it's better to use someone else's parts bin if those parts are well proven.
WOW! WHAT a HIT! I haven't seen a play like THAT since the last time the CUBS won the PENNANT!
At least it wasn't "Starion". Given that the smaller car was "Colt", you can probably guess what the car was actually supposed to be called...
It's also likely, given that Tesla is a lot more of a premium brand than Ford's sales-bulk, that they'll evaluate what technologies Tesla used and why to figure out how to decontent a vehicle enough to fit their market segment. This is actually a good thing for bringing electric vehicles to the masses, as most of us cannot afford a Model S or Model X, and even a lot of people can't or probably shouldn't try to afford a Model 3.
Franchise dealers make their profits on service, not on sales. I am a member of a local car club that meets at a major dealership, and the direct owner of the dealership has addressed the club several times. One time he talked about the finance of running a dealership. They pay their mortgage on the land and buildings, their maintenance of the facility, their staffing, their utilities, and all of their other expensses, and still make a profit on their service.
Dealers may make a profit on sales, but their purpose is to make a profit on service.
But you've failed to deal with all the other arguments against the death penalty.
For a start, execution is more expensive than long-term imprisonment. (If you doubt this, do some reading.)
I am not calling for this for a cost savings. I am calling for an executing for someone like this because the real danger the individual poses outweighs everything else.
Executing nutters like this doesn't act as an effective deterrent, as crazies can't be deterred.
Again, I am not calling for executing this person because of a deterrence effect. I am calling for this person's execution because of the real proven danger this person presents.
There's also the issue of accidentally killing the wrong person, which is always a risk with the death penalty, but admittedly doesn't seem like much of an issue in a case like this.
Exactly, it is not a danger in a case like this. As far as I am concerned, it would be acceptable for the issue of execution to be forwarded up to higher courts in a given nation. The court under which the convict was originally tried is probably not as-able to determine the sentence. Have an intermediate court review the conviction without a specified sentence to determine if the convict's special circumstances warrant execution or not. Choose to recommend, and auto-appeal this to the high court for final decision. Then let a combination of the prosecution and law enforcement make requests to determine when the execution will occur, based on any other pending cases, and then schedule it. If either court finds against execution, the original court proceeds to conventional sentencing.
Spree killers and serial killers would basically be the only parties for whom this would apply. The killer either needs to kill more than one person in short order, or needs to kill more than one person over time.
He his human. A human murdered those people. You are literally de-humanizing him because you don't want to accept the fact that another human, much like yourself, committed horrible crimes. He deserves to be treated like a human. That's the difference between us and his victims.
See, while he's homo sapiens, there's a point when the monstrosity of the crime committed, coupled with the complete lack of doubt that he was the perpetrator, is why I do not support ridding the world of the death penalty. I don't want that penalty to be one of retribution though, I want such a penalty to be akin to putting animals to sleep.
I don't necessarily support the death penalty for one-time murderers, especially those who personally knew the victim, as there are cases when the homicide committed was essentially the final step in a series of escalating events by both people. Such a murderer is probably not going to kill anyone again as the circumstances that led to the murder were extraordinary.
I am much more in favor of the death penalty as an option when the murderer kills people that are unknown to them, or are little more than casual acquaintances. That shows a person that's willing to kill for no reason, rather than at least having a reason like in my previous example. Someone willing to kill for no reason once may well be willing to kill for no reason again.
Why would Tesla sell to Ford?
Yes, a lot of startups sell-out to other companies, but so far that doesn't seem to be Musk's style. On top of that Tesla is poised to grow exponentially without having to be purchased by another company. Tesla is generally doing things that most of the other companies don't want to do or haven't figured out how to do, there's not a lot of reason for them to want to be bought.
It depends on what they did with the knowledge that they acquired.
One of the most important cases was when Compaq used one team to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS in 1982 or so, then another team to take the documentation that the first team created in order to implement a new BIOS to the same specifications wtihout actually looking at the IBM product.
If Ford takes apart the Tesla, documents the kinds of welds, the kinds of materials, the kinds of battery chemistries, and a bunch of other relevant stuff, then passes that information to another team to design a car using those technologies, with the automaker's patent lawyers involved to help avoid treading where they shouldn't, then they're probably good.
Also bear in mind that Musk has made public statements about letting others use his patents. Could be that Ford is protected, to an extent, but such a well-documented public declaration, at least for Tesla patents at the time that Musk made the assertion.
My college library system was organized across at least three libraries, and the only tell which library held a given subset of the collection was the LOC number. It was common to go looking for something, walking through the stacks, to find that LOC numbers skipped, meaning, wrong building. Dammit.
As one of those born-before-1990 people, you were still limited to the editorial choices made by your librarian or library staff, or the city-council or schoolboard or college board that made policy decisions affecting the library. It was also difficult to evaluate the worthiness of the book itself, there were not as many sources to use to find out if the author was truly an expert in the subject or if the author was pushing an agenda that ran toward fringe/junk science.
Then there was the time-element. It simply took a long time to peruse the material. It was often not possible to search the text of the book to find something relevant, one had to hope that the author and editor did their jobs well and organized chapters and subjects in a logical fashion.
Don't get me wrong, there are still a lot of veracity problems with modern Internet-based techniques, and there are still problems with junk work and authors masquerading as legitimate that are merely trying to push an agenda, but it's a lot easier than it used to be to get to that part of evaluating the work, instead of spending so much time just trying to find the works in the first place.
But the person on the ad was not calling anyone "Ghetto"...she said the word to describe T-Mobile, a competitor, was Ghetto.
I'm trying to figure out how they thought it would be beneficial to them to say this in the first place.
Cellular companies are just service providers. If a cheaper service provider meets the customer's needs then why would the customer spend more money than necessary?
Insulting another company through pejoratives that don't have a technical meaning probably does more to galvanize that company's subscribers against the person making the statement than it does to solicit those subscribers, as it is basically an insult to the customers too.
What does the Defense Contract Management Agency have to do with it? You making weapons or ammunition that you're refusing to let be inspected?
This is news for nerds because first, it took a nerd to find it (most people don't have the ability to check where a device is attempting to open ports to) and because it's more news of a pre-hacked piece of equipment that most people would trust to be secure out-of-the-box from arguably the largest retailer in the world. If this was fulfilled by Amazon then it's more evidence that Amazon needs to do more quality control when they agree to stock something. They need at least SQCs and if it's widespread enough, SQEs to do this kind of random-lot testing.
I know you're being silly on purpose, but would a true randomizing device really be necessary? Human traffic patterns already have such a random element to them that even if one somehow could reliably predict the next number in the software algorithm, there are so many other factors that can't be controlled that it's still essentially random anyway.
I honestly could see it being in the low five-figures to develop such an application, but that money would mostly be applied to figuring out how to design the user-interface of the application such that it best-fits with how the TSA is *supposed* to operate, and in beta-testing to confirm that it does what it's supposed to do and that any untrained TSA agent down to the junior-assistant-trainee who breathes with his mouth open could use it and understand it, but mid-six-figures is pretty ridiculous.