Also, while it is unclear that that can work, I'd be surprised if it didn't. I mean, brains are pretty resilient. You can get knocked out cold and still wake up and be fine. Whether from blunt force trauma or from electrocution. You can abuse the brain rather badly before it really stops working entirely. If I were a betting man, I'd bet $1 that even an fMRI with poor temporal resolution (but sufficient spatial resolution) would be sufficient to "boot up" a human brain successfully.
The best part of conversations on this subject is that we'll likely see a conclusive answer within a few decades at most. Medical imaging technology has been improving amazingly fast, and is already very close to where we need to be to pull this off. After that, it's just a matter of building computers big enough, which seems to just be a matter of time as well. At that point, ethical concerns will be the only thing holding us back. That and the issue of, well, how do you know this brain simulation is "working", or how do you interact with it? Does it need a simulated body now? A simulated circulatory system, simulated eyeballs, simulated oxygen-rich atmosphere, simulated Internet-connected terminal? The simulation might need to be much bigger than just a brain for it to be useful (for AI purposes, at least).
Independent of the outcome of such an experiment, we'll surely learn a lot along the way. Many questions will be answered, and many new ones will likely arise. Interesting time to be alive, for sure.
You don't seem to be familiar with the idea of simulation. I believe GP was suggesting we scan a human brain with sufficient resolution, and then use the data from that scan to seed a simulation.
humans decide the parameters for any computer simulation of neural networks
You use the word "decide" here, but that's strange. Sure, we're "deciding" to use a human brain in the simulation. We're also "deciding" to use the known laws of physics to govern the simulation. Those decisions are made because they're the only ones that satisfy our criteria for simulating a human brain subject to the known laws of physics. Not really as arbitrary as you make it out to be. No humans will be deciding any "parameters" for any computer simulation of neural networks. We're not talking about running a large artificial neural network. We're talking about simulating a large collection of particles (determined by the brain scan) interacting with each other in certain ways (determined by physics). Humans program "all of it", except for the structure of the brain and the laws of physics. Those aren't decided by humans, they're merely quantified by humans. There are no heuristics beyond any inherent to a biological brain.
False truths escaped, life goes on. In closing, I'd like to pick apart one last part of your post:
If humans made 'AI' by "copying an existing one"...what would it be? No matter what your answer one factor is the same: it is a constructed system made by humans.
If humans made 'natural intelligence' by "copying an existing one"... what would it be? No matter what your answer one factor is the same: it is a constructed system made by humans. Of course, some might call it a baby. And here we are, billions of us. Some of us even intelligent. You absolutely cannot escape this truth, so accept it and adapt your worldview accordingly.
I've watched the grasshopper videos countless times, but let me get this straight.
This time, the landing legs will supposedly be actuated. They'll fold out just before "landing". I don't think they've done this before, or at least it didn't look like it from the videos. Cool.
This time, they'll be "landing" on water instead of the launchpad. I wouldn't call it landing if it's not on land; they'll be ditching into the ocean. This makes sense, as this is a real mission for a paying customer, not some engineering demo, and any failures (even ones that don't actually impact their customer's mission) would bring lots of bad publicity. Setting the bar low is prudent.
Now, this is all awesome stuff, but I can't help but wonder... What good are landing legs when you're landing in the ocean?
Seriously. Are the legs gonna have flotation devices attached? Is the rocket going to bob around in the ocean, upright, balancing on these landing legs as the waves roll by? I understand the reasoning behind doing a soft landing in the ocean. I just don't understand what the landing legs are for.
Yeah, sorry, a winery isn't a place to "go to eat", even if you can bring food.
And a restaurant isn't a place to "go to drink", even if you can bring alcohol. That's my point. A restaurant charging a corking fee makes about as much sense as a winery charging a "opening your box of crackers" fee. The only difference is that we've already become accustomed to one, but the other would still draw customers' ire as a blatant, unjustifiable money grab.
If the market wouldn't "bear it" then some restaurants wouldn't charge large fees, and the wine would be reasonable.
See, this is where the "free market" rhetoric throws me for a loop. On the one hand, you've got competition putting downward pressure on prices, a hard lower bound with price equal to cost (in the case of corking fees, $0). On the other hand, you've got greed putting upward pressure on prices, with no real upper bound beyond "what the market will bear". I thought one of these invisible hands was supposed to bring about optimally low prices for everyone, but here we are looking at corking fees well in excess of any "cost" associated with letting people drink their own wine. It seems that either competition is lacking (which is clearly false, at least in the restaurant industry), free market economics is wrong (...), or we can agree that a corking fee is just greed at its finest. There's no justification for it beyond that. And indeed, with a captive market (like people eating at a restaurant), greed goes a long way, as a captive market will bear quite a bit.
That's why I don't get Coke at McDonalds. Bottle of water, please.
Either way I'm getting gouged, but at least with the water bottle my rapist is several degrees removed.
Many wineries sell their wares on-site, in addition to providing tastings. You go there to drink wine. And they let you bring your own food instead of insisting that you buy their $100/lb cheese and $5 crackers. Because drinking wine usually involves eating food, unless you're a professional:P
What next, baseball games with $10 beers or raves with $10 water bottles?
... oh.
And that's why I'm ranting. Because so many entrepreneurs have discovered that you can assrape a captive market.
A terrible article about hydrogen reduction reactors and mining the moon from 5 years ago.
I interned at NASA (GSFC) about a decade ago where I worked on a computer vision / robotics project. However, during the course of the internship, I was exposed to other teams, one of which was working on studies of lunar regolith and its viability as a water ore. I'm really not a chemistry guy, so most of what I heard went over my head, but the gist of what I heard was that they weren't sure which [of many] approaches would be most effective/efficient (highly dependent on location as well, which makes sense even if you just think about mining on Earth). Wish I had some citations to contribute.
Much like I expect to be able to bring my own book to a coffee shop, or my own coffee to a bookstore, or my own food to a winery, I expect to be able to bring my own wine to a restaurant.
Of course, many restaurants have decided that it's very lucrative to get a liquor license and start selling absurdly overpriced wine on-premises, netting huge margins. Allowing people to bring their own wine (well, really the same wine that they're selling, but purchased elsewhere at a reasonable price) would enable competition, which is precisely what they're trying to avoid.
So they want to be liquor stores, but they don't want to compete with liquor store. Awesome. Granted, the line does have to be drawn somewhere, otherwise people would just bring their own food, right? Wouldn't you?
I mean, I sure as shit wouldn't. Because what the fuck would the point of that be? I mean, I guess if I really hated the proprietor of the restaurant and was just looking for ways to fuck with them out of spite. Do you really see this as a potential problem? If you do, and you indeed require a line to be drawn, then I'd say that's where the line ought to fall. If a restaurant is an establishment that primarily serves food, then no outside food. If a bar is an establishment that primarily serves alcohol, then no outside alcohol. If an establishment primarily serves both food and alcohol, then that will be reflected by their competitive pricing. If your restaurant charges $80 for a bottle that is normally $30, it's evident that your primary function is to serve food, but holding alcohol hostage is how you make your money.
Greed. Plain and simple. I can think of countless ways to prevent your hypothetical picnic-in-a-restaurant scenario that don't arbitrarily enrich the restaurant. Of course, that's precisely why you don't see any of those ways enacted in practice. Greed. The problem isn't that people would picnic without these kinds of rules. The problem is that profits would fall. The whole picnic basket thing is merely some shitty justification that falsely shifts the topic of conversation from greed to some kind of "but think of the poor job creator" story.
Indeed, you're right. It's not like there'd chunks of ice all over the place (well, except maybe deep craters near the poles). However, NASA has put some serious efforts into R&D to facilitate the efficient extraction of hydrogen and oxygen from lunar regolith. If anyone's got any updated info on this, please chime in, but as of ten years ago (when I last dealt with the industry) this was considered to be a "mostly solved" problem. When I said "water", I meant its constituent elements.
After rereading the summary (there's an article?!), I can't help but think they're lifting the hydrogen up there to run a hydrogen reduction plant. I guess they think it will be easier/cheaper to lift hydrogen to the moon than fire up some microwave ovens, which is the opposite of what NASA expects. Perhaps they feel hydrogen reduction will be less risky than microwave extraction.
Indeed. It's also mindblowing that when your water heater dies, your car's exhaust isn't automatically routed into your faucet (Gasoline engine exhaust is ~ 1/8 water).
Sometimes, a well-defined system isn't quite so robust that "it just works", and that's okay. Sometimes things don't work (for good reason), and having them "magically fix themselves" isn't optimal.
Let's say I want to visit you for breakfast. I get to your house, but you're still sleeping. If you were an Apple product, you'd be teleported from your bed to the front door when I rang the doorbell, just so that everything "just worked".
Perhaps phone users don't want to be concerned with the underlying mechanism by which their "message" gets to its intended recipient. Perhaps they don't care if it's SMS, or if its some proprietary chat protocol going over their data connection, or if it's carrier pigeon. I can only speak for myself when I say this design approach scares the shit out of me. When I send an SMS, I know that it will arrive via SMS. I know if you didn't get my text that you don't need to check your email inbox or your PO box, because SMS is SMS is SMS. If you send a "message" via iMessage and the intended recipient doesn't receive it, can you tell me where things failed? Or does Apple's once-convenient "magic" obscure so much of the process that you really have no idea what's going on behind the scenes?
That doesn't make much sense either, though, as lunar regolith is rich in both hydrogen and oxygen. There's plenty of water there already. In fact, that's one of the primary reasons why the moon is a fantastic candidate for mining.
Now, the rules here are that I can do this, I can bring in my own bottle of wine, but have to pay a corking fee for them to serve it to me in the restaurant. I am fine with this.
First they came...
May I suggest that your previous acceptance of double-dipping is what has encouraged, you guessed it, more double dipping!
I, personally, can't stand corking fees. I've already paid for my bottle of wine. I'm already paying to eat at the restaurant. I have my own corkscrew, for fuck's sake. Just what, exactly, am I paying for when I hand over cash for a corking fee? Greed. Nothing more than greed. The restaurant knows you want your wine. You've already paid for it, after all. And now they can hold your wine for ransom, because they've got you by the balls. Does it cost them anything extra if you bring your own wine? Maybe in the same sense that downloading an mp3 costs Sony some imaginary money.
But you are fine with this, despite there being no rational explanation for any of it. And so the perception is that people don't mind when they have to pay for something twice, as long as they're not paying the same person twice. I am not fine with this.
We're missing the point by focusing on revenues. Sure, obviously taxes are a way to fund the government, and revenues are indeed important.
But tax policy is much more far-reaching than that. I'm not suggesting that bumping up the top marginal rate to 90% is a good idea because it will increase revenues and solve all of our federal budget problems. I am suggesting that turning up the top marginal rate to 90% (not just for income; capital gains tax ought to be progessive as well) will help to slow, stop, or reverse the stratification of wealth that we see today. I'm even going so far as to say that jacking the top marginal rate so high could actually decrease federal tax revenues (whether it's from tax avoidance or from rich people expatriating is irrelevant), but that that's a price worth paying to preserve the existence of the middle class and the socioeconomic mobility that it enables.
In a country that worships the invisible hand and associates nationalization with the Reds, it just couldn't work. The global economy would collapse due to a nationwide explosion of heads in the USA.
I think the concern is for situations where you can't explain that away, but you wouldn't even need to if it weren't for the investigation launched solely due to illegal evidence provided by the NSA.
That's what I thought, but they specifically said "nitrogen (N)", suggesting that we're importing monatomic nitrogen somehow, not a nitrogen-bearing compound. I'm no chemist.
Also, if the sodium thiopental was the thing in lethal injections that kills you, I'd have to wonder why there's all sorts of other crap thrown in the mix. I was under the impression that they only gave you enough sodium thiopental to knock you out, followed by the truly nasty shit that kills you dead (without you being awake enough to scream in pain).
U.S. nitrogen and potash supplies largely depend on imports. More than 50 percent of nitrogen (N) and 85 percent of potash (K2O) supply was from imports in the U.S. in fertilizer year (July 1 to June 30) 2011 (the latest full year of production data available).
Now, I realize that this is in the context of fertilizers, but that's all I could find, and I'd imagine that we use nitrogen for fertilizer more than anything else. Anyway, I was only suggesting this because of the recent story on slashdot about propofol and sodium thiopental and the EU's restrictions on exporting stuff that's used to kill humans. Presumably, sodium thiopental, a sedative, isn't actually what kills you, yet the EU won't send us any more because it's involved in lethal injections. Who knows how they'd see asphyxiation via nitrogen. Who knows if we even import nitrogen from EU. Just some food for thought.
but that means there's still actually a body, and once discovered that is admissable evidence.
Then why is one of the key tenets of parallel reconstruction the total denial of any link to NSA-sourced information? Why don't they openly admit that the investigation started with inadmissible evidence, but that evidence will not be used at trial?
Are you sure that it's got nothing to do with the fact that about half of US nitrogen is imported, and that using nitrogen for execution might prevent certain trade partners from being able to continue legally exporting nitrogen to us, which could have catastrophic consequences for US agriculture?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, while it is unclear that that can work, I'd be surprised if it didn't. I mean, brains are pretty resilient. You can get knocked out cold and still wake up and be fine. Whether from blunt force trauma or from electrocution. You can abuse the brain rather badly before it really stops working entirely. If I were a betting man, I'd bet $1 that even an fMRI with poor temporal resolution (but sufficient spatial resolution) would be sufficient to "boot up" a human brain successfully.
The best part of conversations on this subject is that we'll likely see a conclusive answer within a few decades at most. Medical imaging technology has been improving amazingly fast, and is already very close to where we need to be to pull this off. After that, it's just a matter of building computers big enough, which seems to just be a matter of time as well. At that point, ethical concerns will be the only thing holding us back. That and the issue of, well, how do you know this brain simulation is "working", or how do you interact with it? Does it need a simulated body now? A simulated circulatory system, simulated eyeballs, simulated oxygen-rich atmosphere, simulated Internet-connected terminal? The simulation might need to be much bigger than just a brain for it to be useful (for AI purposes, at least).
Independent of the outcome of such an experiment, we'll surely learn a lot along the way. Many questions will be answered, and many new ones will likely arise. Interesting time to be alive, for sure.
humans decide the parameters for any computer simulation of neural networks
You use the word "decide" here, but that's strange. Sure, we're "deciding" to use a human brain in the simulation. We're also "deciding" to use the known laws of physics to govern the simulation. Those decisions are made because they're the only ones that satisfy our criteria for simulating a human brain subject to the known laws of physics. Not really as arbitrary as you make it out to be. No humans will be deciding any "parameters" for any computer simulation of neural networks. We're not talking about running a large artificial neural network. We're talking about simulating a large collection of particles (determined by the brain scan) interacting with each other in certain ways (determined by physics). Humans program "all of it", except for the structure of the brain and the laws of physics. Those aren't decided by humans, they're merely quantified by humans. There are no heuristics beyond any inherent to a biological brain.
False truths escaped, life goes on. In closing, I'd like to pick apart one last part of your post:
If humans made 'AI' by "copying an existing one"...what would it be? No matter what your answer one factor is the same: it is a constructed system made by humans.
If humans made 'natural intelligence' by "copying an existing one"... what would it be? No matter what your answer one factor is the same: it is a constructed system made by humans. Of course, some might call it a baby. And here we are, billions of us. Some of us even intelligent. You absolutely cannot escape this truth, so accept it and adapt your worldview accordingly.
Are there alternatives to the physicalist viewpoint? Can you name some?
I've watched the grasshopper videos countless times, but let me get this straight.
This time, the landing legs will supposedly be actuated. They'll fold out just before "landing". I don't think they've done this before, or at least it didn't look like it from the videos. Cool.
This time, they'll be "landing" on water instead of the launchpad. I wouldn't call it landing if it's not on land; they'll be ditching into the ocean. This makes sense, as this is a real mission for a paying customer, not some engineering demo, and any failures (even ones that don't actually impact their customer's mission) would bring lots of bad publicity. Setting the bar low is prudent.
Now, this is all awesome stuff, but I can't help but wonder... What good are landing legs when you're landing in the ocean?
Seriously. Are the legs gonna have flotation devices attached? Is the rocket going to bob around in the ocean, upright, balancing on these landing legs as the waves roll by? I understand the reasoning behind doing a soft landing in the ocean. I just don't understand what the landing legs are for.
I'm pretty sure they've recovered the engine from the Grasshopper test vehicle after each of its seven flights.
Yeah, sorry, a winery isn't a place to "go to eat", even if you can bring food.
And a restaurant isn't a place to "go to drink", even if you can bring alcohol. That's my point. A restaurant charging a corking fee makes about as much sense as a winery charging a "opening your box of crackers" fee. The only difference is that we've already become accustomed to one, but the other would still draw customers' ire as a blatant, unjustifiable money grab.
If the market wouldn't "bear it" then some restaurants wouldn't charge large fees, and the wine would be reasonable.
See, this is where the "free market" rhetoric throws me for a loop. On the one hand, you've got competition putting downward pressure on prices, a hard lower bound with price equal to cost (in the case of corking fees, $0). On the other hand, you've got greed putting upward pressure on prices, with no real upper bound beyond "what the market will bear". I thought one of these invisible hands was supposed to bring about optimally low prices for everyone, but here we are looking at corking fees well in excess of any "cost" associated with letting people drink their own wine. It seems that either competition is lacking (which is clearly false, at least in the restaurant industry), free market economics is wrong (...), or we can agree that a corking fee is just greed at its finest. There's no justification for it beyond that. And indeed, with a captive market (like people eating at a restaurant), greed goes a long way, as a captive market will bear quite a bit.
:)
:P
... oh.
That's why I don't get Coke at McDonalds. Bottle of water, please.
Either way I'm getting gouged, but at least with the water bottle my rapist is several degrees removed.
Many wineries sell their wares on-site, in addition to providing tastings. You go there to drink wine. And they let you bring your own food instead of insisting that you buy their $100/lb cheese and $5 crackers. Because drinking wine usually involves eating food, unless you're a professional
What next, baseball games with $10 beers or raves with $10 water bottles?
And that's why I'm ranting. Because so many entrepreneurs have discovered that you can assrape a captive market.
A terrible article about hydrogen reduction reactors and mining the moon from 5 years ago.
I interned at NASA (GSFC) about a decade ago where I worked on a computer vision / robotics project. However, during the course of the internship, I was exposed to other teams, one of which was working on studies of lunar regolith and its viability as a water ore. I'm really not a chemistry guy, so most of what I heard went over my head, but the gist of what I heard was that they weren't sure which [of many] approaches would be most effective/efficient (highly dependent on location as well, which makes sense even if you just think about mining on Earth). Wish I had some citations to contribute.
It's a restaurant, not a winery.
Much like I expect to be able to bring my own book to a coffee shop, or my own coffee to a bookstore, or my own food to a winery, I expect to be able to bring my own wine to a restaurant.
Of course, many restaurants have decided that it's very lucrative to get a liquor license and start selling absurdly overpriced wine on-premises, netting huge margins. Allowing people to bring their own wine (well, really the same wine that they're selling, but purchased elsewhere at a reasonable price) would enable competition, which is precisely what they're trying to avoid.
So they want to be liquor stores, but they don't want to compete with liquor store. Awesome. Granted, the line does have to be drawn somewhere, otherwise people would just bring their own food, right? Wouldn't you?
I mean, I sure as shit wouldn't. Because what the fuck would the point of that be? I mean, I guess if I really hated the proprietor of the restaurant and was just looking for ways to fuck with them out of spite. Do you really see this as a potential problem? If you do, and you indeed require a line to be drawn, then I'd say that's where the line ought to fall. If a restaurant is an establishment that primarily serves food, then no outside food. If a bar is an establishment that primarily serves alcohol, then no outside alcohol. If an establishment primarily serves both food and alcohol, then that will be reflected by their competitive pricing. If your restaurant charges $80 for a bottle that is normally $30, it's evident that your primary function is to serve food, but holding alcohol hostage is how you make your money.
Greed. Plain and simple. I can think of countless ways to prevent your hypothetical picnic-in-a-restaurant scenario that don't arbitrarily enrich the restaurant. Of course, that's precisely why you don't see any of those ways enacted in practice. Greed. The problem isn't that people would picnic without these kinds of rules. The problem is that profits would fall. The whole picnic basket thing is merely some shitty justification that falsely shifts the topic of conversation from greed to some kind of "but think of the poor job creator" story.
Indeed, you're right. It's not like there'd chunks of ice all over the place (well, except maybe deep craters near the poles). However, NASA has put some serious efforts into R&D to facilitate the efficient extraction of hydrogen and oxygen from lunar regolith. If anyone's got any updated info on this, please chime in, but as of ten years ago (when I last dealt with the industry) this was considered to be a "mostly solved" problem. When I said "water", I meant its constituent elements.
After rereading the summary (there's an article?!), I can't help but think they're lifting the hydrogen up there to run a hydrogen reduction plant. I guess they think it will be easier/cheaper to lift hydrogen to the moon than fire up some microwave ovens, which is the opposite of what NASA expects. Perhaps they feel hydrogen reduction will be less risky than microwave extraction.
First mover advantage...
ICQ was released in 1996...
Indeed. It's also mindblowing that when your water heater dies, your car's exhaust isn't automatically routed into your faucet (Gasoline engine exhaust is ~ 1/8 water).
Sometimes, a well-defined system isn't quite so robust that "it just works", and that's okay. Sometimes things don't work (for good reason), and having them "magically fix themselves" isn't optimal.
Let's say I want to visit you for breakfast. I get to your house, but you're still sleeping. If you were an Apple product, you'd be teleported from your bed to the front door when I rang the doorbell, just so that everything "just worked".
Perhaps phone users don't want to be concerned with the underlying mechanism by which their "message" gets to its intended recipient. Perhaps they don't care if it's SMS, or if its some proprietary chat protocol going over their data connection, or if it's carrier pigeon. I can only speak for myself when I say this design approach scares the shit out of me. When I send an SMS, I know that it will arrive via SMS. I know if you didn't get my text that you don't need to check your email inbox or your PO box, because SMS is SMS is SMS. If you send a "message" via iMessage and the intended recipient doesn't receive it, can you tell me where things failed? Or does Apple's once-convenient "magic" obscure so much of the process that you really have no idea what's going on behind the scenes?
I'm waiting until 1996 before recommending ICQ as the alternative to WhatsApp.
Wait, what?
That doesn't make much sense either, though, as lunar regolith is rich in both hydrogen and oxygen. There's plenty of water there already. In fact, that's one of the primary reasons why the moon is a fantastic candidate for mining.
Now, the rules here are that I can do this, I can bring in my own bottle of wine, but have to pay a corking fee for them to serve it to me in the restaurant. I am fine with this.
First they came...
May I suggest that your previous acceptance of double-dipping is what has encouraged, you guessed it, more double dipping!
I, personally, can't stand corking fees. I've already paid for my bottle of wine. I'm already paying to eat at the restaurant. I have my own corkscrew, for fuck's sake. Just what, exactly, am I paying for when I hand over cash for a corking fee? Greed. Nothing more than greed. The restaurant knows you want your wine. You've already paid for it, after all. And now they can hold your wine for ransom, because they've got you by the balls. Does it cost them anything extra if you bring your own wine? Maybe in the same sense that downloading an mp3 costs Sony some imaginary money.
But you are fine with this, despite there being no rational explanation for any of it. And so the perception is that people don't mind when they have to pay for something twice, as long as they're not paying the same person twice. I am not fine with this.
The 8 kernel is so improved it runs on mediocre Nokia phones with qualcom 1.5 ghz cpus and is snappy and responsive
When did Qualcomm come out with x86 CPUs?
We're missing the point by focusing on revenues. Sure, obviously taxes are a way to fund the government, and revenues are indeed important.
But tax policy is much more far-reaching than that. I'm not suggesting that bumping up the top marginal rate to 90% is a good idea because it will increase revenues and solve all of our federal budget problems. I am suggesting that turning up the top marginal rate to 90% (not just for income; capital gains tax ought to be progessive as well) will help to slow, stop, or reverse the stratification of wealth that we see today. I'm even going so far as to say that jacking the top marginal rate so high could actually decrease federal tax revenues (whether it's from tax avoidance or from rich people expatriating is irrelevant), but that that's a price worth paying to preserve the existence of the middle class and the socioeconomic mobility that it enables.
In a country that worships the invisible hand and associates nationalization with the Reds, it just couldn't work. The global economy would collapse due to a nationwide explosion of heads in the USA.
I think the concern is for situations where you can't explain that away, but you wouldn't even need to if it weren't for the investigation launched solely due to illegal evidence provided by the NSA.
ReaganPhone ran on landlines though, so it merits no outrage.
I think that's how it works...
See citation provided in thread.
That's what I thought, but they specifically said "nitrogen (N)", suggesting that we're importing monatomic nitrogen somehow, not a nitrogen-bearing compound. I'm no chemist.
Also, if the sodium thiopental was the thing in lethal injections that kills you, I'd have to wonder why there's all sorts of other crap thrown in the mix. I was under the impression that they only gave you enough sodium thiopental to knock you out, followed by the truly nasty shit that kills you dead (without you being awake enough to scream in pain).
U.S. nitrogen and potash supplies largely depend on imports. More than 50 percent of nitrogen (N) and 85 percent of potash (K2O) supply was from imports in the U.S. in fertilizer year (July 1 to June 30) 2011 (the latest full year of production data available).
Citation
Now, I realize that this is in the context of fertilizers, but that's all I could find, and I'd imagine that we use nitrogen for fertilizer more than anything else. Anyway, I was only suggesting this because of the recent story on slashdot about propofol and sodium thiopental and the EU's restrictions on exporting stuff that's used to kill humans. Presumably, sodium thiopental, a sedative, isn't actually what kills you, yet the EU won't send us any more because it's involved in lethal injections. Who knows how they'd see asphyxiation via nitrogen. Who knows if we even import nitrogen from EU. Just some food for thought.
but that means there's still actually a body, and once discovered that is admissable evidence.
Then why is one of the key tenets of parallel reconstruction the total denial of any link to NSA-sourced information? Why don't they openly admit that the investigation started with inadmissible evidence, but that evidence will not be used at trial?
Are you sure that it's got nothing to do with the fact that about half of US nitrogen is imported, and that using nitrogen for execution might prevent certain trade partners from being able to continue legally exporting nitrogen to us, which could have catastrophic consequences for US agriculture?