You don't get it - we don't need Science and Math to discuss these questions, we just need to refer to hundreds of years old questions philosophers never actually managed to settle. And its not the people who claim they can now settle those questions without even using science and math, questions many of the best and most famous minds of the ages got nowhere with, who lack humility - it's the people who want to defer to science and math. How dare anyone point out that Aristotle, St. Augustine, the Buddha, and Thomas Jefferson could only get so far in discussing a nearby supernova by relying on trees falling in woods paradoxes, we here on slashdot are smarter than all those guys put together, and you're being unmutual.
The comics code was harsh, and it was obvious the people implementing it were stupid fools, toadies and jerks, bent on agrandizing themselves and their political viewpoint from very early on. For stupidity, the code authors didn't know how to write laws in legal English, so they put in clauses forbidding depicting zombieism and werewolfism (I suppose by analogy with the word 'vampirism'.). One of the biggest reasons many people still believe today that finely ground glass in food is undetectable and will kill the eater is that the code prohibited all realistic depiction of any method of murder that even might actually work, so detective oriented characters such as Batman or the Question had to stop solving realistic crimes and solve impossible ones, where magnets attracted copper and giant magnifying glasses could be rendered invisible yet still focus the sun's rays. Ground glass was a favorite during the 50's, one that became incorporated into urban legends. For toadying, the early code prohibited ever showing an elected official or policeman committing any crime, even if they were caught and punished. The code linked the American way of life directly with free market capitalism, and prohibited all mention of drug use, even in an negative light, so one of the first cases of a mainstream comic not receiving the code seal was basically that it mentioned "Heroin is bad for you kids, so don't do it, m-kay?" It proved far easier for the code authorities to say "America doesn't have a drug problem, so don't talk about it in comics, at all", than to allow anti-drug messages.
It's not completely unprecedented though. The biosciences weapon theorists have been worrying about control of airborne transmission, by tailored pathogens that target a particular ethnic group selectively, for at least a decade now. Some basic conclusions have become almost tautological, particularly two of them, that some nations with particularly homogeneous populations would benefit from such selectivity much more than other, more diverse, nations, and that some racist groups would make producing such weapons their highest priority if they were at all achievable by them. Some of the fundamentals should apply to this class of weapons as well, for one, the optimum time of attack will still be greatly affected by weather, just as it is for other bio and for chemical attacks. Wind will definitely be a factor as normal, and we can obviously figure out how much, if any, sunlight, humidity, and temperature extremes affect prions in air or on surfaces. I'd bet research to answer such questions is already going on.
Sheer, not shear, unless one of those Fox pundits is his barber. But yes, I already expect some people to talk out of both sides of their mouths on the video game question when the FBI search hits the mainstream news.
Plus, it empowers the guards to keep prison abuse under tight control, and allowing it empowers the most violent criminals, makes punishment drastic for the least violent criminals instead of the worst, and eventually gives us prisons so out of control that the guards themselves are in more danger.
Murderers are mostly pretty screwed up. They don't really focus on doing some kind of justice society has 'become too soft' to do, like raping child molesters or killing other, nastier murderers like Jeffery Dahmer. They are just as likely to rape the guy who's in just for bad checks or kill the guy who merely stole a car.
Practically, If someone does a lot of things necessary to commit the crime, over a period of months, then this affects culpability. Insanity in that context means the person didn't have a semi-rational moment anywhere in those months, when they focused for a bit, said to themselves "Hey, maybe this is a little nuts - I should talk to someone.". A jury may reject that a person could be consistently insane for so long but not have meandered either so far into insanity that their conduct meant someone would recognise the threat, or back into lucidity for long enough to recognize the need for help. For example, John Hinckley, Jr., who attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan, did some things such as managing to transport his weapons on a plane, without behaving in such a way as to cause extra inspection of his luggage. He obviously didn't mention his plan to get Jodie Foster's attention by potting President Reagan to the flight attendants.
Alternately, the person did have such a moment, and decided to do the wrong thing, which means classic English style law holds they have moral responsibility (guilt), even if they also have some kind of insanity.
The problem with such legal models is that we know of a lot of paranoid schizophrenics who do go to great lengths to hide their problem and often manage for years and years, but we don't want to declare them sane.
I took it to mean that the various questions of whether a normal criminal trial is the next step we should be proceeding towards are not what he wants to discus or focus on, but he is acknowledging that there are people who have raised such questions.
I'll raise a couple of them, although even mentioning them will probably get me insta-modded flamebait. I'm not taking sides on them any more than the grandparent poster did, mind you, just pointing out that he is correct, they do exist. 1. Should the American system make the sanity determination part of the trial by jury, and even if this is the way we should do things, should we interweave it with the rest of the things the jury has to decide all at the same time? It's been said in other contexts that the Judge is there to administer the Law, and the Jury to determine the facts, but if the jury was being asked just to determine just the fact of insanity and not also guilt for some person, we normally wouldn't turn that determination over to a jury at all. 2. If it turns out the shooter does have political links, or was guided by someone who appears more sane and had a political agenda, well, the US has a naval base in Cuba full of people, some of whom are known to be insane, and who have committed what would normally be most serious crimes, but the government opposes the validity of treating them as criminal suspects and calls them enemy combatants instead. If the validity of criminal proceedings is unquestionable, then something in these two points is an irreconcilable paradox. The way US law has worked, not every case of mass murder with many witnesses directly observing it automatically proceeds to a normal trail, so somebody inside the government asks those questions, at least.
Again, I'm not the OP either, so maybe that's not the sort of issue with validity he was thinking of and leaving to the side.
And very near the end of Atlas Shrugged, where a decent human by Rand's own standards is abandoned on a deserted railroad line to probably die, because while he is basically ethical (again, by Rand's definitions), he doesn't have the LEET skills of one of Rand's supermen, and the point is that's right, he should resign himself to die if needed as collateral damage of their right to join John Galt? Rand writes against human sacrefice, and then shows one at the end of the book, but she's somehow diametrically opposed to it still - ergo Eddie Willers isn't human. It's different from Hitler's "Jews aren't human", or Communism's "The Capitalist Class isn't human" only in scale.
Anyone who puts Adolph Hitler on the liberal side is redefining what everyone else means by left and right based on an incredibly biased and one sided political agenda. Look, if you walked into a meeting and said the greatest living scientist is L Ron Hubbard, you might be able to argue for L Ron's 'scientificness' (or whatever), but once you claim he's still alive, no one listens any more. If you argued that Jesus wants you to physically oppose the Muslims, people might actually care about why you interpreted the Bible that way, even if they disagreed, but once you start claiming that Jesus personally told you that just before he gave you a gold Rolex, we give up on you. You can argue about Native American rights any way you want, but when you say the first President of the US was George Armstrong Custer, we all decide you are either a loony or an idiot. Learn enough about the Nazis to understand why historians put Hitler on the right, or nobody who made it into college will give a flying burrito brother about anything else you follow it up with.
He did list one of Ayn Rand's books among his favorites... He also listed Karl Marx, and some people on the right are trying to show this proves a conventional left wing stance. An old B&W photo with long hair got a lot of airplay early on Fox and others. I don't particularly believe that its a deliberate attempt to associate him with the left to pick out the 'hippyest' photo, over more recent ones of him that made him look like a typical young construction worker, or the actual most recent 'bald loony' shot now circulating. I figure the hippy look photo was just what some reporters found early when searching the net. Not everything is a conspiracy. But, after Fox's habit of changing (R) to (D) after politicians names when they get arrested, I watched to see how heavy Fox hit that tiny older photo. As far as voting goes, as you point out he actually registered as an independent, which is optional, and he did not vote in the last election, but he did previously. That could better fit a person who was seriously political, and got too radicalised to think voting was a solution, than someone apolitical. In fact, it would be unusual if he didn't have some strong views on some fringe issue with that profile. The video you mentioned was Zeitgeist, and that is associated with some of the right wing "truther' movement. That doesn't mean that the assassin's views really fit with any particular party, and by the time he did it, his views probably just don't make sense from any political framework, but saying nothing remotely points to him as a conservative is a stretch. Nothing really confirms it, or the converse, and people should not leap to either conclusion.
It's more than just curiosity. Right now, the assassin certainly looks like a lone case, and with a high probability of mental illness. But, Nihilists and Anarchists have certainly been organised, political assassins in the past, for example the killer of the Archduke Ferdinand who gave Germany an excuse to start World War 1. In other historic cases, people who had some already diagnosed mental illness have still been guided or coached, or even been the guides or coaches (for example, Charles Manson). In a case like this, it's entirely reasonable for the government to look at the possibilities that he's a. faking, b. someone's pawn, c. conversed enough with someone else that they aided and abetted, d. had financial support or e. probably 10 other possibilities.
Plus, insanity itself may not lend itself to our understanding the reasons, but knowing whether normal people heard statements and didn't know they should have taken them seriously may lead to better tools to identify what are real threats and not just bluster, or demonstrate that public education about mental illness could help keep the insane person from getting as far as this one did.
Physics is inherently mathematical. The Phenomenon is only accurately described by physics if two things happen. 1. The phenomenon can be completely treated as subject to physics (Prove that, if you can - prove that formal science can answer all questions about the phenomenon, in advance of actually finding those answers). 2. Someone coined the right math. A fundamentally wrong theory could generate solutions that look closer to accurately describing a phenomenon than a prior theory, but stlll not be the right theory.*.
You used the phrase "physical phenomena". That's begging your question, like saying the law is just and then replacing it with the claim that the law is correct in all legal matters. Of course, if the phenomenon is 'physical', it's described by physics, that's semantically redundant. That doesn't mean that being able to apply some math to it makes it physical - Or the corollary would be that until we get some accurate math on it, we can't claim the phenomenon is physical!
Personally, I'll be happy to proceed from the axiom that there is an objective external reality that is physical, and the other axiom that a black hole can eventually be fully described by physics, and your third axiom that physics is mathematical. But, one reasons from axioms, not to them...
* For a good example, Dark ages tapestries and such often show arrows as following a simple upwards angle until their momentum is spent, then turning down to follow a reflective angle to their targets. You can replace this with the same math that describes catenary curves on a flat earth and get a curve that strongly resembles an arrow's. At any given point, that math will be a pretty good descriptor of the position and velocity vector of the arrow. Never-the-less, the real arrow's path is fundamentally a parabola (the Earth is not flat!). Shoot a projectile fast enough in some directions and that caternary solution becomes wildly wrong. Did our math really get closer when it gave us better data for a select subset of the phenomina but also tricked theoreticians into thinking that same math would work over the whole possible range of ballistics, and made a misleading 'proof' the Earth was flat that has since been quoted by nutcase cults? (Or should we avoid using words such as 'closer' or phrases such as 'close enough' without specifying in what sense?)
"Kit" has common use in the American south and west, so much so that I was surprised to see the number of people who don't recognise the word in context. It's not used much in the Northeast until you get to or perhaps north of Boston, and those people in between are capable of simultaneously believing that its an archaeism when the British use it and a neologism when Southerners do. I've been lectured I should stop using the word that way and speak "real English" by people before, so I just say "Deys takin hour Jerbs! How bout dem Jets!", and they chill.
People are probably visualising a pile of cheap resistors or 8 bit stock ICs and thinking this sort of thing is much less valuable than a finished assembly based on them. Figure military grade Germanium transistors, matched sets of ceramic capacitors with 1% tolerances, or other custom stuff of the sort used to protype something before you take the project to mass production, and the individual parts are probably more like a few hundred dollars apiece than the 0.23 cents in bulk Chinese electrolytic caps some of you are imagining.
(Doubling up here for the quoted part) 1 . For every person who swears they could make a lot more investing their money themselves there are 2 or 3 who try it and fail, and 2 or 3 more who keep meaning to get around to it but don't ever get their act together. Maybe the parent could really do it, maybe he's smarter and more self disciplined than a lot of other people who have made the same boast, but statistically, he's way wrong. 2. If he's paying on 8 months, that's about an 8.3% rate, compared to the poorest workers making only 10 or 20 K a year, who are paying 12.5%. He's complaining about being taxed at a lower rate than the poorest people who have a job at all. Whaaaaahhhhhh! Tell, me, I'm 6''5", 250 lbs can bench press 480 (Kilos), and personally kicked Bruce Lee's, John Claude van Damme's and Chuck Norris' asses at the same time, beating them severely with Kurt Russell in his Snake Pliskin suit, and I own my own nuclear weapons for defense, so why do as much of my taxes go for police protection as some fat neckbeard's (Disclaimer: Not really, on any of that - Disclamer 2: If you did somehow believe all that BS, I also want to sell a nice bridge cheap, you'll make loads of money.). Oh, and I come from a very long lived family, why aren't my insurance rates lower than everyone else's? I do better work than any of my coworkers, why am I in the same paygrade? Whaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!
The Social Security Administration and IRS are two civilian govt. agencies that bought into computing early (1960's or even before). Part of this upgrade is like the FBI's situation of 10 years or so ago. Under USA PATRIOT, they have to work with a whole bunch of other agencies that are all built around more modern gear (Homeland Security mandates SSA can send data seamlessly to Border Security, FEMA, DEA and others, who don't know COBOL from Commander Adama's dog). Soc. Sec. now has to be able to verify to other agencies, not just that a name and number match, but that the number was issued as "valid for employment" (As opposed to numbers issued as part of some student only visas and such). This mandate comes from HSA, and yet the funding is carried on SSA's books. That way, the public (especially on the right) complains more about how civilian agency costs are too high, and doesn't see it as part of the Police Agency section of the budget.
Social Security's client base is a tremendous chunk of "every citizen in the US". With records of every quarterly payment sent in for what is often a 40 or 50 year employment history, every monthly payment sent out for what is often a 10 year plus retirement, Medicare related records, court transcripts and records where someone has successfully challenged a disability ruling, all the ongoing legal paperwork where someone is still in the process of challenging one, an individual investigators report whenever someone applies for disability, a death benefit, or other claim, and the need to verify SSNs to other government agencies in formats they can handle (which means the SSA is being expected to ensure format compatibility so some other, smaller or more isolated agencies don't have to get with the program, would you really expect all that to fit in less than 3 Kb? Would your own employer's copies of your paycheck info fit in less than 3 Kb? How about your medical records (even leaving out actual copies of X-rays and sonograms and such, which I'm pretty sure the SSA doesn't need to store anything analogous)? How many Kb of records does a typical administrative hearing generate? A typical court case?
Palin will never be elected now - Cross-hairs and the death of a ten year old girl decided that.* I used to not particularly like Sarah Palin as a candidate, but I knew she had never actually said she could see Russia from her house (that was Tina Fay, parodying what Sarah actually said). I knew she wasn't as dumb as some people were portraying her, and I was at least willing to listen to her message. Last night, Sarah Palin's website was changed to take down the Cross-hair commercial that had painted them on our now wounded Arizona representitive, hours before Ms. Palin's staff changed anything else (like posting an actual disclaimer that she was not endorsing violence). At this point I will mortgage my home to provide funds for anyone of either party who looks like he or she has a chance to defeat Sarah Palin in 2012. She's been rid of some of her troublesome priests, let her find out that in America, that will not make her King!
*And the death of a Federal Judge, the hopefully non-fatal wounding of the wife of a Navy Captain and multiple mission Astronaut, and the deaths of a campaign worker and three totally unconnected adult bystanders.
I'm amazed by how many people call SS a Ponzi scheme. It simply isn't, if only because the payouts and the administrative costs together are generally less than the pay ins. it takes more than not compartmentalising individual pay ins and basing pay outs on individuallly invested funds to make something a Ponzi scheme - otherwise all Health Insurance would be a Ponzi Scheme. For Social Security, there's literally none of the amplification effect of a Ponzi where you have to keep getting more and more people into the system just to cover the existing payouts and the total projected payout grows without limit. The only growth in payout for Social Security is the result of long term growth of population, and the tax rate is high enough to allow for that. You simply can't suddenly have an additional 30% or 50% or more people who have just signed up and now expect to be paid off within a few months or years.
Social Security is solvent - the worst anyone actually claims about it is it will be falling into a negative range, where intake will be only 75% of outgo, by 2034, and this negative range will last for about 13 to 15 years if no adjustments are made. Some people are calling that bankruptcy. Tell me - when people retire on their savings, doesn't their outgo generally exceed new income? Sure, some of them will eventually exhaust their savings entirely, but we don't announce that all people who retire are bankrupt just because outgo exceeds income, even though that state usually lasts for the rest of that person's life. Social Security enters a temporary period of negative growth, and Social Security is currently owed large amounts because the positive balance it gained during periods of positive growth was borrowed by Congress to support the general fund. Unless population growth slows much further than expected or the US government selectively defaults on its internal debts to its own citizens to prop up its foreign debt, Social security will re-enter a positive growth period way before all the money now owed to it from the general fund is paid back.
Classification was originally evolved for military intelligence. Do military intelligence right, and you report only on capabilities, not intentions, opinions, or personalities. A proper MI report describes what assets and liabilities Saudi Arabia has, and stays away from speculating about whether the King or anyone else will use them a certain way. Civilian oversight decides whether someone is an enemy and will use their military assets to attack, not the military (at least that's the way it's supposed to be in the US). If a trained observer notes that the Saudis are selectively putting crews to work at sites that produce lower grade crude oil, that might actually be classified secret, if only to make it harder for the Saudis to figure out who the person generating the report is. But that report shouldn't speculate about why the Saudis might be selectively marketing their lower grade crude and conserving their top grade, let alone go into the observer's opinion of the King's personality. Part of the problem here is that civilian persons, including both diplomatic personnel and decision makers, are using the classification system that is only built to work for military intelligence and only built to work if the m.i. process is done right up to the time the decision to classify is made. The civil oversight is using classification to cover their asses, and they go to that mode easily because they're already misunderstanding how classification should work just by thinking it will work for the kind of stuff they put in a report.
Forgiven. 1. Some theories said the moon had to be solid. It's smaller than Earth so it ought to have cooled faster. It has a lower average density than Earth so it shouldn't have lots of radioactive elements in its core, adding heat as they decay (Since all the long lasting radioactive isotopes are dense metals). 2. You were probably informed that its calculated density showed the Moon couldn't have enough pressure near its center for an inner core to be crystaline iron, with an outer core of molten iron. That's what we think Earth is like. It explains our strong magnetic field, and its lack would explain why the Moon (and Mars, Mercury and Venus, also all somewhat smaller than Earth) doesn't (don't) have a similar magnetic field (s). That's only partly changed. This evidence suggests the moon has an inner core and outer core that are respectively solid and liquid (like Earth). It has a boundary layer above the outer core that goes gradually from liquid to slushy to sort of solid (unlike Earth, where the next boundary is pretty sharply defined). It has a solid crust (like Earth). So what's different besides that interesting slushyness? Iron. Earth's core is probably nearly all Iron, packed into a very regular crystal. Huge chunks of core have been pressurised enough to erase the irregularities between smaller crystals and merge them into one crystal structure wherever possible until you get to the top bit where it becomes more a bunch of discreet crystals and then molten Iron in the outer core. The Moon's core appears to be solid surrounded by liquid, but it doesn't appear to be almost all Iron - it still has much lighter material mixed in compared to Earth's core. So, if your high school geology teacher said the Moon couldn't have a solid Iron inner core with the vastest part of it in a regular crystal state, and a molten outer core, they may still have gotten it right, but if they went farther and said it couldn't be solid surrounded by liquid or couldn't be liquid at all, they definitely went too far in explaining the limited observations of the time. 3. Some of the Selenologic data comes from Apollo. Some comes from more recent efforts like the south polar impactor mission. Not all that data matches, so it's probable this all needs more work and new instrumentation to be more confident we eventually get the whole model right. What's happened here is we have gotten closer to making the kind and quality of observations we have made to Earth itself during many earthquakes and other events, but arguably we are still not 100% caught up.
This failed because businesses wanted a National ID number for their customers, they started using it as one, and they made it ubiquitous enough the government isn't going to prosecute. The legislation isn't built to fail, and it didn't fail, it was simply ignored by enough banks and financials that it doesn't work unless the fed took actions the same people who decry big government would call hamstringing the economy. You have the choice of a Big Government that allowed SSN misuse rather than limit the economic growth they were told allowing it would create, or the same Big Businesses that broke the SSN wide open to get that growth. Even if you simultaniously believe that "Business Freedom promotes Growth, and that Growth is good for the Individual Citizen!", and that "Big Government Wants to Control your Life!", how can you hold the government totally responsible and not the businesses in your example case? You're looking at two large men with lead pipes in their hands, and saying, "I want to be mugged by that guy on the right, I don't trust the one on the left."
I work in a business that uses digital signatures for many customers (Tax Prep), and am at the mostly corporate and banking related levels. The accountability as far as law is concerned is achieved several ways, depending on just what services I or a fellow employee is providing. Offhand, I can think of:
Offering a completely paper and snail mail based alternative for basic tax services. Patriot act compliance, including an unexpired photo ID from a specific list of types. Public Key encryption, with the software at both the commercial and government ends verified by both parties, and modern high grade algorithms. (Corporate policy does not let me disclose just which one, sorry). Unaccompanied access limits ("two 'man' rule" both for selected locations and for some transactions). Route tracing software that confirms the intermediate nodes each packet passes through, including everything from just making sure all packets remain in the continental US on all hops (which we always do at a minimum), to limiting to specific carriers or even a fixed nodal path. This is effectively a form of VPN like connectivity, but with more fine control possible than the standard implementation (Again, I can't go any farther into details). Federal background checks on all employees, including the ones who do not ordinarily handle customer data, just because they could physically get access. Multiple layers of physical security for the paper records and server rooms, and multiple layers of password security with separate password requirements. Treasury dept issued IDs and transaction control cards, both to do some things with the fed and as an additional way for fellow employees to verify their status within the company. You have to know how to use some of these to derive the information actually transmitted, not just possess one and scan it - it's a "something you know" as well as a "something you have", (and again I can't say further).
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You, Sir, should have posted nominously. Tha'ts it, you've won the thread.
You don't get it - we don't need Science and Math to discuss these questions, we just need to refer to hundreds of years old questions philosophers never actually managed to settle. And its not the people who claim they can now settle those questions without even using science and math, questions many of the best and most famous minds of the ages got nowhere with, who lack humility - it's the people who want to defer to science and math. How dare anyone point out that Aristotle, St. Augustine, the Buddha, and Thomas Jefferson could only get so far in discussing a nearby supernova by relying on trees falling in woods paradoxes, we here on slashdot are smarter than all those guys put together, and you're being unmutual.
The comics code was harsh, and it was obvious the people implementing it were stupid fools, toadies and jerks, bent on agrandizing themselves and their political viewpoint from very early on.
For stupidity, the code authors didn't know how to write laws in legal English, so they put in clauses forbidding depicting zombieism and werewolfism (I suppose by analogy with the word 'vampirism'.). One of the biggest reasons many people still believe today that finely ground glass in food is undetectable and will kill the eater is that the code prohibited all realistic depiction of any method of murder that even might actually work, so detective oriented characters such as Batman or the Question had to stop solving realistic crimes and solve impossible ones, where magnets attracted copper and giant magnifying glasses could be rendered invisible yet still focus the sun's rays. Ground glass was a favorite during the 50's, one that became incorporated into urban legends.
For toadying, the early code prohibited ever showing an elected official or policeman committing any crime, even if they were caught and punished. The code linked the American way of life directly with free market capitalism, and prohibited all mention of drug use, even in an negative light, so one of the first cases of a mainstream comic not receiving the code seal was basically that it mentioned "Heroin is bad for you kids, so don't do it, m-kay?" It proved far easier for the code authorities to say "America doesn't have a drug problem, so don't talk about it in comics, at all", than to allow anti-drug messages.
It's not completely unprecedented though. The biosciences weapon theorists have been worrying about control of airborne transmission, by tailored pathogens that target a particular ethnic group selectively, for at least a decade now. Some basic conclusions have become almost tautological, particularly two of them, that some nations with particularly homogeneous populations would benefit from such selectivity much more than other, more diverse, nations, and that some racist groups would make producing such weapons their highest priority if they were at all achievable by them. Some of the fundamentals should apply to this class of weapons as well, for one, the optimum time of attack will still be greatly affected by weather, just as it is for other bio and for chemical attacks. Wind will definitely be a factor as normal, and we can obviously figure out how much, if any, sunlight, humidity, and temperature extremes affect prions in air or on surfaces. I'd bet research to answer such questions is already going on.
Not so much... Mobsters usually follow recognised safety procedures, and forensic scientists sometimes do.
Sheer, not shear, unless one of those Fox pundits is his barber.
But yes, I already expect some people to talk out of both sides of their mouths on the video game question when the FBI search hits the mainstream news.
Plus, it empowers the guards to keep prison abuse under tight control, and allowing it empowers the most violent criminals, makes punishment drastic for the least violent criminals instead of the worst, and eventually gives us prisons so out of control that the guards themselves are in more danger.
Murderers are mostly pretty screwed up. They don't really focus on doing some kind of justice society has 'become too soft' to do, like raping child molesters or killing other, nastier murderers like Jeffery Dahmer. They are just as likely to rape the guy who's in just for bad checks or kill the guy who merely stole a car.
Practically, If someone does a lot of things necessary to commit the crime, over a period of months, then this affects culpability. Insanity in that context means the person didn't have a semi-rational moment anywhere in those months, when they focused for a bit, said to themselves "Hey, maybe this is a little nuts - I should talk to someone.". A jury may reject that a person could be consistently insane for so long but not have meandered either so far into insanity that their conduct meant someone would recognise the threat, or back into lucidity for long enough to recognize the need for help. For example, John Hinckley, Jr., who attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan, did some things such as managing to transport his weapons on a plane, without behaving in such a way as to cause extra inspection of his luggage. He obviously didn't mention his plan to get Jodie Foster's attention by potting President Reagan to the flight attendants.
Alternately, the person did have such a moment, and decided to do the wrong thing, which means classic English style law holds they have moral responsibility (guilt), even if they also have some kind of insanity.
The problem with such legal models is that we know of a lot of paranoid schizophrenics who do go to great lengths to hide their problem and often manage for years and years, but we don't want to declare them sane.
I took it to mean that the various questions of whether a normal criminal trial is the next step we should be proceeding towards are not what he wants to discus or focus on, but he is acknowledging that there are people who have raised such questions.
I'll raise a couple of them, although even mentioning them will probably get me insta-modded flamebait. I'm not taking sides on them any more than the grandparent poster did, mind you, just pointing out that he is correct, they do exist.
1. Should the American system make the sanity determination part of the trial by jury, and even if this is the way we should do things, should we interweave it with the rest of the things the jury has to decide all at the same time? It's been said in other contexts that the Judge is there to administer the Law, and the Jury to determine the facts, but if the jury was being asked just to determine just the fact of insanity and not also guilt for some person, we normally wouldn't turn that determination over to a jury at all.
2. If it turns out the shooter does have political links, or was guided by someone who appears more sane and had a political agenda, well, the US has a naval base in Cuba full of people, some of whom are known to be insane, and who have committed what would normally be most serious crimes, but the government opposes the validity of treating them as criminal suspects and calls them enemy combatants instead. If the validity of criminal proceedings is unquestionable, then something in these two points is an irreconcilable paradox. The way US law has worked, not every case of mass murder with many witnesses directly observing it automatically proceeds to a normal trail, so somebody inside the government asks those questions, at least.
Again, I'm not the OP either, so maybe that's not the sort of issue with validity he was thinking of and leaving to the side.
And very near the end of Atlas Shrugged, where a decent human by Rand's own standards is abandoned on a deserted railroad line to probably die, because while he is basically ethical (again, by Rand's definitions), he doesn't have the LEET skills of one of Rand's supermen, and the point is that's right, he should resign himself to die if needed as collateral damage of their right to join John Galt? Rand writes against human sacrefice, and then shows one at the end of the book, but she's somehow diametrically opposed to it still - ergo Eddie Willers isn't human. It's different from Hitler's "Jews aren't human", or Communism's "The Capitalist Class isn't human" only in scale.
Anyone who puts Adolph Hitler on the liberal side is redefining what everyone else means by left and right based on an incredibly biased and one sided political agenda.
Look, if you walked into a meeting and said the greatest living scientist is L Ron Hubbard, you might be able to argue for L Ron's 'scientificness' (or whatever), but once you claim he's still alive, no one listens any more. If you argued that Jesus wants you to physically oppose the Muslims, people might actually care about why you interpreted the Bible that way, even if they disagreed, but once you start claiming that Jesus personally told you that just before he gave you a gold Rolex, we give up on you. You can argue about Native American rights any way you want, but when you say the first President of the US was George Armstrong Custer, we all decide you are either a loony or an idiot. Learn enough about the Nazis to understand why historians put Hitler on the right, or nobody who made it into college will give a flying burrito brother about anything else you follow it up with.
He did list one of Ayn Rand's books among his favorites...
He also listed Karl Marx, and some people on the right are trying to show this proves a conventional left wing stance. An old B&W photo with long hair got a lot of airplay early on Fox and others. I don't particularly believe that its a deliberate attempt to associate him with the left to pick out the 'hippyest' photo, over more recent ones of him that made him look like a typical young construction worker, or the actual most recent 'bald loony' shot now circulating. I figure the hippy look photo was just what some reporters found early when searching the net. Not everything is a conspiracy. But, after Fox's habit of changing (R) to (D) after politicians names when they get arrested, I watched to see how heavy Fox hit that tiny older photo.
As far as voting goes, as you point out he actually registered as an independent, which is optional, and he did not vote in the last election, but he did previously. That could better fit a person who was seriously political, and got too radicalised to think voting was a solution, than someone apolitical. In fact, it would be unusual if he didn't have some strong views on some fringe issue with that profile. The video you mentioned was Zeitgeist, and that is associated with some of the right wing "truther' movement. That doesn't mean that the assassin's views really fit with any particular party, and by the time he did it, his views probably just don't make sense from any political framework, but saying nothing remotely points to him as a conservative is a stretch. Nothing really confirms it, or the converse, and people should not leap to either conclusion.
It's more than just curiosity. Right now, the assassin certainly looks like a lone case, and with a high probability of mental illness. But, Nihilists and Anarchists have certainly been organised, political assassins in the past, for example the killer of the Archduke Ferdinand who gave Germany an excuse to start World War 1. In other historic cases, people who had some already diagnosed mental illness have still been guided or coached, or even been the guides or coaches (for example, Charles Manson). In a case like this, it's entirely reasonable for the government to look at the possibilities that he's a. faking, b. someone's pawn, c. conversed enough with someone else that they aided and abetted, d. had financial support or e. probably 10 other possibilities.
Plus, insanity itself may not lend itself to our understanding the reasons, but knowing whether normal people heard statements and didn't know they should have taken them seriously may lead to better tools to identify what are real threats and not just bluster, or demonstrate that public education about mental illness could help keep the insane person from getting as far as this one did.
Physics is inherently mathematical. The Phenomenon is only accurately described by physics if two things happen.
1. The phenomenon can be completely treated as subject to physics (Prove that, if you can - prove that formal science can answer all questions about the phenomenon, in advance of actually finding those answers). 2. Someone coined the right math. A fundamentally wrong theory could generate solutions that look closer to accurately describing a phenomenon than a prior theory, but stlll not be the right theory.*.
You used the phrase "physical phenomena". That's begging your question, like saying the law is just and then replacing it with the claim that the law is correct in all legal matters. Of course, if the phenomenon is 'physical', it's described by physics, that's semantically redundant. That doesn't mean that being able to apply some math to it makes it physical - Or the corollary would be that until we get some accurate math on it, we can't claim the phenomenon is physical!
Personally, I'll be happy to proceed from the axiom that there is an objective external reality that is physical, and the other axiom that a black hole can eventually be fully described by physics, and your third axiom that physics is mathematical. But, one reasons from axioms, not to them...
* For a good example, Dark ages tapestries and such often show arrows as following a simple upwards angle until their momentum is spent, then turning down to follow a reflective angle to their targets. You can replace this with the same math that describes catenary curves on a flat earth and get a curve that strongly resembles an arrow's. At any given point, that math will be a pretty good descriptor of the position and velocity vector of the arrow. Never-the-less, the real arrow's path is fundamentally a parabola (the Earth is not flat!). Shoot a projectile fast enough in some directions and that caternary solution becomes wildly wrong. Did our math really get closer when it gave us better data for a select subset of the phenomina but also tricked theoreticians into thinking that same math would work over the whole possible range of ballistics, and made a misleading 'proof' the Earth was flat that has since been quoted by nutcase cults? (Or should we avoid using words such as 'closer' or phrases such as 'close enough' without specifying in what sense?)
"Kit" has common use in the American south and west, so much so that I was surprised to see the number of people who don't recognise the word in context. It's not used much in the Northeast until you get to or perhaps north of Boston, and those people in between are capable of simultaneously believing that its an archaeism when the British use it and a neologism when Southerners do. I've been lectured I should stop using the word that way and speak "real English" by people before, so I just say "Deys takin hour Jerbs! How bout dem Jets!", and they chill.
People are probably visualising a pile of cheap resistors or 8 bit stock ICs and thinking this sort of thing is much less valuable than a finished assembly based on them. Figure military grade Germanium transistors, matched sets of ceramic capacitors with 1% tolerances, or other custom stuff of the sort used to protype something before you take the project to mass production, and the individual parts are probably more like a few hundred dollars apiece than the 0.23 cents in bulk Chinese electrolytic caps some of you are imagining.
(Doubling up here for the quoted part)
1 . For every person who swears they could make a lot more investing their money themselves there are 2 or 3 who try it and fail, and 2 or 3 more who keep meaning to get around to it but don't ever get their act together. Maybe the parent could really do it, maybe he's smarter and more self disciplined than a lot of other people who have made the same boast, but statistically, he's way wrong.
2. If he's paying on 8 months, that's about an 8.3% rate, compared to the poorest workers making only 10 or 20 K a year, who are paying 12.5%. He's complaining about being taxed at a lower rate than the poorest people who have a job at all. Whaaaaahhhhhh! Tell, me, I'm 6''5", 250 lbs can bench press 480 (Kilos), and personally kicked Bruce Lee's, John Claude van Damme's and Chuck Norris' asses at the same time, beating them severely with Kurt Russell in his Snake Pliskin suit, and I own my own nuclear weapons for defense, so why do as much of my taxes go for police protection as some fat neckbeard's (Disclaimer: Not really, on any of that - Disclamer 2: If you did somehow believe all that BS, I also want to sell a nice bridge cheap, you'll make loads of money.). Oh, and I come from a very long lived family, why aren't my insurance rates lower than everyone else's? I do better work than any of my coworkers, why am I in the same paygrade? Whaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!
The Social Security Administration and IRS are two civilian govt. agencies that bought into computing early (1960's or even before). Part of this upgrade is like the FBI's situation of 10 years or so ago. Under USA PATRIOT, they have to work with a whole bunch of other agencies that are all built around more modern gear (Homeland Security mandates SSA can send data seamlessly to Border Security, FEMA, DEA and others, who don't know COBOL from Commander Adama's dog). Soc. Sec. now has to be able to verify to other agencies, not just that a name and number match, but that the number was issued as "valid for employment" (As opposed to numbers issued as part of some student only visas and such). This mandate comes from HSA, and yet the funding is carried on SSA's books. That way, the public (especially on the right) complains more about how civilian agency costs are too high, and doesn't see it as part of the Police Agency section of the budget.
Social Security's client base is a tremendous chunk of "every citizen in the US". With records of every quarterly payment sent in for what is often a 40 or 50 year employment history, every monthly payment sent out for what is often a 10 year plus retirement, Medicare related records, court transcripts and records where someone has successfully challenged a disability ruling, all the ongoing legal paperwork where someone is still in the process of challenging one, an individual investigators report whenever someone applies for disability, a death benefit, or other claim, and the need to verify SSNs to other government agencies in formats they can handle (which means the SSA is being expected to ensure format compatibility so some other, smaller or more isolated agencies don't have to get with the program, would you really expect all that to fit in less than 3 Kb? Would your own employer's copies of your paycheck info fit in less than 3 Kb? How about your medical records (even leaving out actual copies of X-rays and sonograms and such, which I'm pretty sure the SSA doesn't need to store anything analogous)? How many Kb of records does a typical administrative hearing generate? A typical court case?
Palin will never be elected now - Cross-hairs and the death of a ten year old girl decided that.* I used to not particularly like Sarah Palin as a candidate, but I knew she had never actually said she could see Russia from her house (that was Tina Fay, parodying what Sarah actually said). I knew she wasn't as dumb as some people were portraying her, and I was at least willing to listen to her message. Last night, Sarah Palin's website was changed to take down the Cross-hair commercial that had painted them on our now wounded Arizona representitive, hours before Ms. Palin's staff changed anything else (like posting an actual disclaimer that she was not endorsing violence). At this point I will mortgage my home to provide funds for anyone of either party who looks like he or she has a chance to defeat Sarah Palin in 2012. She's been rid of some of her troublesome priests, let her find out that in America, that will not make her King!
*And the death of a Federal Judge, the hopefully non-fatal wounding of the wife of a Navy Captain and multiple mission Astronaut, and the deaths of a campaign worker and three totally unconnected adult bystanders.
I'm amazed by how many people call SS a Ponzi scheme. It simply isn't, if only because the payouts and the administrative costs together are generally less than the pay ins. it takes more than not compartmentalising individual pay ins and basing pay outs on individuallly invested funds to make something a Ponzi scheme - otherwise all Health Insurance would be a Ponzi Scheme. For Social Security, there's literally none of the amplification effect of a Ponzi where you have to keep getting more and more people into the system just to cover the existing payouts and the total projected payout grows without limit. The only growth in payout for Social Security is the result of long term growth of population, and the tax rate is high enough to allow for that. You simply can't suddenly have an additional 30% or 50% or more people who have just signed up and now expect to be paid off within a few months or years.
Social Security is solvent - the worst anyone actually claims about it is it will be falling into a negative range, where intake will be only 75% of outgo, by 2034, and this negative range will last for about 13 to 15 years if no adjustments are made. Some people are calling that bankruptcy. Tell me - when people retire on their savings, doesn't their outgo generally exceed new income? Sure, some of them will eventually exhaust their savings entirely, but we don't announce that all people who retire are bankrupt just because outgo exceeds income, even though that state usually lasts for the rest of that person's life. Social Security enters a temporary period of negative growth, and Social Security is currently owed large amounts because the positive balance it gained during periods of positive growth was borrowed by Congress to support the general fund. Unless population growth slows much further than expected or the US government selectively defaults on its internal debts to its own citizens to prop up its foreign debt, Social security will re-enter a positive growth period way before all the money now owed to it from the general fund is paid back.
Classification was originally evolved for military intelligence. Do military intelligence right, and you report only on capabilities, not intentions, opinions, or personalities. A proper MI report describes what assets and liabilities Saudi Arabia has, and stays away from speculating about whether the King or anyone else will use them a certain way. Civilian oversight decides whether someone is an enemy and will use their military assets to attack, not the military (at least that's the way it's supposed to be in the US). If a trained observer notes that the Saudis are selectively putting crews to work at sites that produce lower grade crude oil, that might actually be classified secret, if only to make it harder for the Saudis to figure out who the person generating the report is. But that report shouldn't speculate about why the Saudis might be selectively marketing their lower grade crude and conserving their top grade, let alone go into the observer's opinion of the King's personality.
Part of the problem here is that civilian persons, including both diplomatic personnel and decision makers, are using the classification system that is only built to work for military intelligence and only built to work if the m.i. process is done right up to the time the decision to classify is made. The civil oversight is using classification to cover their asses, and they go to that mode easily because they're already misunderstanding how classification should work just by thinking it will work for the kind of stuff they put in a report.
Forgiven.
1. Some theories said the moon had to be solid. It's smaller than Earth so it ought to have cooled faster. It has a lower average density than Earth so it shouldn't have lots of radioactive elements in its core, adding heat as they decay (Since all the long lasting radioactive isotopes are dense metals).
2. You were probably informed that its calculated density showed the Moon couldn't have enough pressure near its center for an inner core to be crystaline iron, with an outer core of molten iron. That's what we think Earth is like. It explains our strong magnetic field, and its lack would explain why the Moon (and Mars, Mercury and Venus, also all somewhat smaller than Earth) doesn't (don't) have a similar magnetic field (s). That's only partly changed. This evidence suggests the moon has an inner core and outer core that are respectively solid and liquid (like Earth). It has a boundary layer above the outer core that goes gradually from liquid to slushy to sort of solid (unlike Earth, where the next boundary is pretty sharply defined). It has a solid crust (like Earth). So what's different besides that interesting slushyness? Iron. Earth's core is probably nearly all Iron, packed into a very regular crystal. Huge chunks of core have been pressurised enough to erase the irregularities between smaller crystals and merge them into one crystal structure wherever possible until you get to the top bit where it becomes more a bunch of discreet crystals and then molten Iron in the outer core. The Moon's core appears to be solid surrounded by liquid, but it doesn't appear to be almost all Iron - it still has much lighter material mixed in compared to Earth's core. So, if your high school geology teacher said the Moon couldn't have a solid Iron inner core with the vastest part of it in a regular crystal state, and a molten outer core, they may still have gotten it right, but if they went farther and said it couldn't be solid surrounded by liquid or couldn't be liquid at all, they definitely went too far in explaining the limited observations of the time.
3. Some of the Selenologic data comes from Apollo. Some comes from more recent efforts like the south polar impactor mission. Not all that data matches, so it's probable this all needs more work and new instrumentation to be more confident we eventually get the whole model right. What's happened here is we have gotten closer to making the kind and quality of observations we have made to Earth itself during many earthquakes and other events, but arguably we are still not 100% caught up.
This failed because businesses wanted a National ID number for their customers, they started using it as one, and they made it ubiquitous enough the government isn't going to prosecute. The legislation isn't built to fail, and it didn't fail, it was simply ignored by enough banks and financials that it doesn't work unless the fed took actions the same people who decry big government would call hamstringing the economy. You have the choice of a Big Government that allowed SSN misuse rather than limit the economic growth they were told allowing it would create, or the same Big Businesses that broke the SSN wide open to get that growth. Even if you simultaniously believe that "Business Freedom promotes Growth, and that Growth is good for the Individual Citizen!", and that "Big Government Wants to Control your Life!", how can you hold the government totally responsible and not the businesses in your example case? You're looking at two large men with lead pipes in their hands, and saying, "I want to be mugged by that guy on the right, I don't trust the one on the left."
I work in a business that uses digital signatures for many customers (Tax Prep), and am at the mostly corporate and banking related levels. The accountability as far as law is concerned is achieved several ways, depending on just what services I or a fellow employee is providing. Offhand, I can think of:
Offering a completely paper and snail mail based alternative for basic tax services.
Patriot act compliance, including an unexpired photo ID from a specific list of types.
Public Key encryption, with the software at both the commercial and government ends verified by both parties, and modern high grade algorithms. (Corporate policy does not let me disclose just which one, sorry).
Unaccompanied access limits ("two 'man' rule" both for selected locations and for some transactions).
Route tracing software that confirms the intermediate nodes each packet passes through, including everything from just making sure all packets remain in the continental US on all hops (which we always do at a minimum), to limiting to specific carriers or even a fixed nodal path. This is effectively a form of VPN like connectivity, but with more fine control possible than the standard implementation (Again, I can't go any farther into details).
Federal background checks on all employees, including the ones who do not ordinarily handle customer data, just because they could physically get access.
Multiple layers of physical security for the paper records and server rooms, and multiple layers of password security with separate password requirements.
Treasury dept issued IDs and transaction control cards, both to do some things with the fed and as an additional way for fellow employees to verify their status within the company. You have to know how to use some of these to derive the information actually transmitted, not just possess one and scan it - it's a "something you know" as well as a "something you have", (and again I can't say further).