I disagree that life-threatening temperatures are a corner case that most of the population won't experience. Being stranded without heat for too long even at 40F can result in a threat to your life. I will agree that -60F is a corner case, but that doesn't mean it can be ignored altogether.
An electric vest won't prevent frostbite to your nose. Most of the time, it's not -60F here. That usually only happens once every couple of years for a day or two. But Murphy's Law governs the situation - if I am going to be stuck in a snowbank in an electric car, it will be on a night when it is sixty below.
There, fixed that for you. Universally accepted as what he would have said today to mean the same thing as he did then, whether by speaking the first half of a Greek curse or just by turning his eyes away from his traitorous friend.
The real problem is that nobody's talking about these things, so we have no real data in front of us about how well an electric car can heat its interior for a long period of time in extreme cold. The same applies to hybrid cars, but even more so to all-electric models because a hybrid car could just run the gas engine to generate heat.
And don't worry. My summer survival kit includes two good blankets just for those random picnic moments. And because you can get hypothermia on a 90-degree day if you do it right.
Thanks for running some of the numbers, although I don't know whether a 1000W heater is enough (I'm not saying it isn't - I'm saying that I don't know one way or the other). I do want to see it in action before I would consider buying it, though. I know the survivability with a gas engine and full tank and have developed the skills to maximize that survivability. I need to see actual tests of heating the car against the frigid outdoors for a few days straight on a 50% charge before I can really evaluate that.
But don't miss my real point. It is rare to get stuck in a snowbank beyond the point you can rock your car back out of it, but that's no excuse not to prepare for the possibility. It happens more often than serious collisions but you wouldn't want a car without airbags and seat belts, either. The cost-benefit on this works out in favor of gas engines so far.
A little bit of carbon monoxide (step one, by the way, of getting stuck in a snowbank for the long haul is to clear snow from the exhaust pipe of the car) is a small price to pay for not freezing to death.
Also, do you really think that they are producing batteries that won't discharge rapidly or utterly melt down in attempting to keep a car's interior 100 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the outside temperature (40F when it's -60F outside) for almost 18 hours (the length of time the sun is down in the winter here)? Current car batteries can't run the headlights that long, so even the massive storage arrays that are being played with in electric cars do not inspire a lot of faith in me when it comes to life-or-death situations.
What's the survivability rate for 24 hours in -60F temperatures with just a warm sleeping bag? I keep the sleeping bag plus a full tank of gas in my vehicle during the winter. An electric car would drastically reduce survivability, and I am happy to burn a little gasoline in order to greatly increase my odds of survival.
As it is, I feel that an electric car that can even keep me warm on the 5-mile drive to work and back without needing a re-charge during the day, on those days when the temperature is below about -30F.
I, on the other hand, can't justify that price. I live in a colder climate and cannot spend $50k on a vehicle I only drive four months of the year (that's what my motorcycle is for). It's a safety consideration. A traditional gas-powered car, when stuck in a snow bank, will idle with the heat running and keep you alive for a very long time. An electric car will let you freeze to death before morning (and hope of rescue) comes.
You nailed it. And to be fair, while that one was on purpose, the assumption probably doesn't apply unless I explicitly mention it in that particular instance - in cases when I don't, assume stupidity. =)
That seems fair enough. And of course, I didn't RTFA so I don't even know if we have pictures to see what the study saw, but I agree that there are transcultural ugly traits. I just didn't get the impression that this article was about hunchbacks getting sentenced to longer prison terms than I would - it sounded more like it was about me getting a longer sentence than Brad Pitt's less famous clone.
Whenever something can be explained by stupidity, that is the most likely explanation. (A corollary of "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be described by stupidity.") The only exception to this rule is if it's me, then assume irony.
Just sitting at the table is enough to make an impression. How you sit and what you do while you sit there are big factors. I was involved in one particular mock trial in which the jury explicitly said afterwards that the way the defendant chewed gum at the table made them think she was callous about the whole thing.
Incidentally, yours is the only comment using the word "objective" that I saw in a quick search, so you get this response instead of the top level. How do we know that this study was done objectively to begin with? Looks are subjective, so it's a fair bet that it wasn't. There also was unlikely any adjustment for the possibility that ugly people commit more crimes or commit more heinous crimes than attractive people do. This whole things belongs in Idle, which itself belongs in/dev/null.
I'm responding this one last time to point out that (a) I was right, you think you won because of people walking away and (b) it's not an ad hominem argument because I never said you're wrong because you're a moron. Those were separate points.
You are wrong because you failed to address, as I brought up in my first comment in response to your post linking to your blog:
Whether civil commitment as involved in this case is a form of "punishment" within the meaning of Calder v. Bull. Of great importance here is that you cite to a Supreme Court case and then insist that other citations to the same are not needed, as if that case stands alone and is the only exception to your argument that you cannot cite to Supreme Court decisions because they are the problem. You claim support from the very thing you are discrediting and then refuse to go any further with it. Regardless of what source you are citing for the proposition that civil commitment is a form of punishment within the context of ex post facto laws, you do in fact need to analyze that point more than "I said so." You have failed to do so.
If so, then whether there has been any constitutionally-prohibited act taken which does in fact increase the punishment for offenses after they were committed in United States v. Comstock. You have also failed to address this. An ex post facto law is one that is passed after the commission of the criminal act that, in the context here, increases the punishment for it beyond that provided by law at the time it was committed. You do not discuss this at all. Rather, you seem to be saying that the imposition of civil commitment near the end of the criminal sentence is the act of making an ex post facto law. That is simply not so, within the definition of the term that you rely on.
I have seen you continually refuse to engage these or any other rational points, constantly going back to the playground method. You do need to understand, though, that I am making two separate points here: First, you are wrong on the law because you have not actually analyzed it in any meaningful way but rather draw conclusions and then repeat them louder as the only support for them; and second, the entirely independent point that I am no longer going to discuss this with you because you are an infant. That is categorically not an ad hominem argument and you'd do well to learn to understand that on top of all the other things that you clearly do not.
You're doing a whole lot of ranting with absolutely no citation to anything but your own beliefs. That's been your problem from the start. Your misapplication of terminology is a side issue - the real issue is that you are not engaging in rational discourse. You are doing what third-graders do, simply refusing to discuss issues and repeating the same unsupported conclusion over and over again as if repetition makes it right.
This is most likely compounded by people giving up on you ever engaging in a real conversation about things and walking away, which you interpret as a concession that you were correct and use to reinforce your perception of superiority, but I don't have enough experience with you to know whether that's the case. I can, however, assure you that I will not be accumulating any such experience. You are not correct simply because nobody wants to argue with you.
Don't worry. They think they are, like 'fyngyrz' arguing that his blog was in fact a rigorous legal analysis because he mentioned one case that defines what an ex post facto law is. Two +5 Insightful moderations for his unwillingness to actually address the legal issues present here.
While it's obvious that Slashdotters aren't going to be reading the Court's opinions as a general rule, your point bears amplification and I would put it this way: If the Court doesn't address something, it means that nobody argued it in front of them. And if nobody argued it in front of them, there is a reason. Whether that reason is that the parties did not feel it was a valid argument or the Court did not grant certiorari on the question, the underlying point is that people much more knowledgeable and skillful at legal argument than anyone here decided that it was a losing argument not even worth making, such as one person's suggestion that the law in question was a bill of attainder.
It's extremely unlikely that the lawyers and judges involved didn't think of something that you, upon reading the text of the Constitution and nothing else, were brilliantly able to spot.
I read your blog, including your reliance on Calder, which you'd know if you had read and understood my response. Showing your work in logical discourse is more than just saying "this is clearly X because it is similar to X in my own mind." You need to show the steps between point A and point B. At no point do you discuss whether civil commitment is punishment for a crime. By the way, I'm not addressing some of your other points, such as due process, since by making them you show that you actually did not read the Supreme Court's opinion that does in fact address the due process issue.
Do you have a citation other than to your own blog? I note the lack of any reference to civil commitment, which is discussed at length by the Supreme Court. A thorough analysis that concludes that this Supreme Court decision enables an ex post facto law must cover the following issues: First, whether civil commitment as involved in this case is a form of "punishment" within the meaning of Calder v. Bull; and, if so, then second, whether there has been any constitutionally-prohibited act taken which does in fact increase the punishment for offenses after they were committed in United States v. Comstock.
Your blog addresses neither of these issues. It simply states that "Clearly, extending a prisoners sentence beyond that specified by the law at the time of conviction qualifies in every way for this class of ex post facto law." There is no analysis of the real issues. Even if you are right, you really do need to show your work on this one.
That said, your other blog entries are intriguing, particularly regarding the aurora (visible from my location, as well, so I can directly benefit from your photo op detection code). I don't mean to discredit you at all as a person, merely to suggest that you be more rigorous in the discussion of this issue because I think it bears doing.
Exactly. My comment was a metric to help people judge how knowledgeable others are when it comes to actually writing Lisp code. People who spell it LISP are generally much less so.
What they stand for doesn't really matter that much. You have to name the two elements of a pair something, and as long as the name is arbitrary it may as well be easily composed the way car and cdr are. But if you want to name them something else, that's fine, too.
I just don't think that a language can be judged based on the names it uses for these things. It's not like they're hard to remember if you actually use Lisp and, in that regard, they are no different from a wide variety of other names in various languages, including but not limited to cout, println, < as a class inheritance syntax, variable sigils, etc.
All that being said, I think we can probably agree that the terminology of the 704 was stupid to begin with.
I actually like car and cdr, because of the equal length of their names and the ease with which you can combine them in various forms to get specific pieces of a nested list, such as caddaddr. However, my approach to programming is that the name of a function is not as important as the language it finds itself in. You could write car and cdr for Basic and it still wouldn't be a good language to write real software in.
As you read through the many comments that will be posted on this article, please keep the following advice in mind: People who spell it LISP are not qualified to judge modern (read: post-1984) Lisp-family languages, probably having 100% of their exposure come from a one-hour lecture and small homework assignment in a programming languages course taught by someone who thought that Common Lisp is a single-paradigm functional language.
Re:Those who do not understand Lisp -
on
Programming Clojure
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I would argue that parking meter enforcement's merits are unrelated to profit or loss of the operation. If the purpose of parking meters is to increase parking space turnaround so that more people are able to park in a certain area, such as a congested downtown commercial district, then that purpose is met as long as drivers are sufficiently incentivized to give up parking spaces after a reasonable amount of time (either by the cost of paying the meter for more time or by the expected cost of parking tickets (probability of receiving a ticket times dollar figure on the ticket). Similarly, speeding enforcement on highways is supposed to be about making the roads safer rather than making a profit for the government. Of course, the justifiable purposes of doing something rarely and only briefly have anything to do with the real purposes at work.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree that life-threatening temperatures are a corner case that most of the population won't experience. Being stranded without heat for too long even at 40F can result in a threat to your life. I will agree that -60F is a corner case, but that doesn't mean it can be ignored altogether.
An electric vest won't prevent frostbite to your nose. Most of the time, it's not -60F here. That usually only happens once every couple of years for a day or two. But Murphy's Law governs the situation - if I am going to be stuck in a snowbank in an electric car, it will be on a night when it is sixty below.
Caesar: WTF? Screw you, man!
There, fixed that for you. Universally accepted as what he would have said today to mean the same thing as he did then, whether by speaking the first half of a Greek curse or just by turning his eyes away from his traitorous friend.
The real problem is that nobody's talking about these things, so we have no real data in front of us about how well an electric car can heat its interior for a long period of time in extreme cold. The same applies to hybrid cars, but even more so to all-electric models because a hybrid car could just run the gas engine to generate heat.
And don't worry. My summer survival kit includes two good blankets just for those random picnic moments. And because you can get hypothermia on a 90-degree day if you do it right.
Thanks for running some of the numbers, although I don't know whether a 1000W heater is enough (I'm not saying it isn't - I'm saying that I don't know one way or the other). I do want to see it in action before I would consider buying it, though. I know the survivability with a gas engine and full tank and have developed the skills to maximize that survivability. I need to see actual tests of heating the car against the frigid outdoors for a few days straight on a 50% charge before I can really evaluate that.
But don't miss my real point. It is rare to get stuck in a snowbank beyond the point you can rock your car back out of it, but that's no excuse not to prepare for the possibility. It happens more often than serious collisions but you wouldn't want a car without airbags and seat belts, either. The cost-benefit on this works out in favor of gas engines so far.
A little bit of carbon monoxide (step one, by the way, of getting stuck in a snowbank for the long haul is to clear snow from the exhaust pipe of the car) is a small price to pay for not freezing to death.
Also, do you really think that they are producing batteries that won't discharge rapidly or utterly melt down in attempting to keep a car's interior 100 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the outside temperature (40F when it's -60F outside) for almost 18 hours (the length of time the sun is down in the winter here)? Current car batteries can't run the headlights that long, so even the massive storage arrays that are being played with in electric cars do not inspire a lot of faith in me when it comes to life-or-death situations.
Here's a good Latin lesson to help with this type of difficulty: Romanes Eunt Domus.
What's the survivability rate for 24 hours in -60F temperatures with just a warm sleeping bag? I keep the sleeping bag plus a full tank of gas in my vehicle during the winter. An electric car would drastically reduce survivability, and I am happy to burn a little gasoline in order to greatly increase my odds of survival.
As it is, I feel that an electric car that can even keep me warm on the 5-mile drive to work and back without needing a re-charge during the day, on those days when the temperature is below about -30F.
I, on the other hand, can't justify that price. I live in a colder climate and cannot spend $50k on a vehicle I only drive four months of the year (that's what my motorcycle is for). It's a safety consideration. A traditional gas-powered car, when stuck in a snow bank, will idle with the heat running and keep you alive for a very long time. An electric car will let you freeze to death before morning (and hope of rescue) comes.
You nailed it. And to be fair, while that one was on purpose, the assumption probably doesn't apply unless I explicitly mention it in that particular instance - in cases when I don't, assume stupidity. =)
That seems fair enough. And of course, I didn't RTFA so I don't even know if we have pictures to see what the study saw, but I agree that there are transcultural ugly traits. I just didn't get the impression that this article was about hunchbacks getting sentenced to longer prison terms than I would - it sounded more like it was about me getting a longer sentence than Brad Pitt's less famous clone.
Whenever something can be explained by stupidity, that is the most likely explanation. (A corollary of "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be described by stupidity.") The only exception to this rule is if it's me, then assume irony.
Just sitting at the table is enough to make an impression. How you sit and what you do while you sit there are big factors. I was involved in one particular mock trial in which the jury explicitly said afterwards that the way the defendant chewed gum at the table made them think she was callous about the whole thing.
Incidentally, yours is the only comment using the word "objective" that I saw in a quick search, so you get this response instead of the top level. How do we know that this study was done objectively to begin with? Looks are subjective, so it's a fair bet that it wasn't. There also was unlikely any adjustment for the possibility that ugly people commit more crimes or commit more heinous crimes than attractive people do. This whole things belongs in Idle, which itself belongs in /dev/null.
You are wrong because you failed to address, as I brought up in my first comment in response to your post linking to your blog:
I have seen you continually refuse to engage these or any other rational points, constantly going back to the playground method. You do need to understand, though, that I am making two separate points here: First, you are wrong on the law because you have not actually analyzed it in any meaningful way but rather draw conclusions and then repeat them louder as the only support for them; and second, the entirely independent point that I am no longer going to discuss this with you because you are an infant. That is categorically not an ad hominem argument and you'd do well to learn to understand that on top of all the other things that you clearly do not.
You're doing a whole lot of ranting with absolutely no citation to anything but your own beliefs. That's been your problem from the start. Your misapplication of terminology is a side issue - the real issue is that you are not engaging in rational discourse. You are doing what third-graders do, simply refusing to discuss issues and repeating the same unsupported conclusion over and over again as if repetition makes it right.
This is most likely compounded by people giving up on you ever engaging in a real conversation about things and walking away, which you interpret as a concession that you were correct and use to reinforce your perception of superiority, but I don't have enough experience with you to know whether that's the case. I can, however, assure you that I will not be accumulating any such experience. You are not correct simply because nobody wants to argue with you.
Don't worry. They think they are, like 'fyngyrz' arguing that his blog was in fact a rigorous legal analysis because he mentioned one case that defines what an ex post facto law is. Two +5 Insightful moderations for his unwillingness to actually address the legal issues present here.
While it's obvious that Slashdotters aren't going to be reading the Court's opinions as a general rule, your point bears amplification and I would put it this way: If the Court doesn't address something, it means that nobody argued it in front of them. And if nobody argued it in front of them, there is a reason. Whether that reason is that the parties did not feel it was a valid argument or the Court did not grant certiorari on the question, the underlying point is that people much more knowledgeable and skillful at legal argument than anyone here decided that it was a losing argument not even worth making, such as one person's suggestion that the law in question was a bill of attainder.
It's extremely unlikely that the lawyers and judges involved didn't think of something that you, upon reading the text of the Constitution and nothing else, were brilliantly able to spot.
I read your blog, including your reliance on Calder, which you'd know if you had read and understood my response. Showing your work in logical discourse is more than just saying "this is clearly X because it is similar to X in my own mind." You need to show the steps between point A and point B. At no point do you discuss whether civil commitment is punishment for a crime. By the way, I'm not addressing some of your other points, such as due process, since by making them you show that you actually did not read the Supreme Court's opinion that does in fact address the due process issue.
Do you have a citation other than to your own blog? I note the lack of any reference to civil commitment, which is discussed at length by the Supreme Court. A thorough analysis that concludes that this Supreme Court decision enables an ex post facto law must cover the following issues: First, whether civil commitment as involved in this case is a form of "punishment" within the meaning of Calder v. Bull; and, if so, then second, whether there has been any constitutionally-prohibited act taken which does in fact increase the punishment for offenses after they were committed in United States v. Comstock.
Your blog addresses neither of these issues. It simply states that "Clearly, extending a prisoners sentence beyond that specified by the law at the time of conviction qualifies in every way for this class of ex post facto law." There is no analysis of the real issues. Even if you are right, you really do need to show your work on this one.
That said, your other blog entries are intriguing, particularly regarding the aurora (visible from my location, as well, so I can directly benefit from your photo op detection code). I don't mean to discredit you at all as a person, merely to suggest that you be more rigorous in the discussion of this issue because I think it bears doing.
Exactly. My comment was a metric to help people judge how knowledgeable others are when it comes to actually writing Lisp code. People who spell it LISP are generally much less so.
What they stand for doesn't really matter that much. You have to name the two elements of a pair something, and as long as the name is arbitrary it may as well be easily composed the way car and cdr are. But if you want to name them something else, that's fine, too.
I just don't think that a language can be judged based on the names it uses for these things. It's not like they're hard to remember if you actually use Lisp and, in that regard, they are no different from a wide variety of other names in various languages, including but not limited to cout, println, < as a class inheritance syntax, variable sigils, etc.
All that being said, I think we can probably agree that the terminology of the 704 was stupid to begin with.
I actually like car and cdr, because of the equal length of their names and the ease with which you can combine them in various forms to get specific pieces of a nested list, such as caddaddr. However, my approach to programming is that the name of a function is not as important as the language it finds itself in. You could write car and cdr for Basic and it still wouldn't be a good language to write real software in.
As you read through the many comments that will be posted on this article, please keep the following advice in mind: People who spell it LISP are not qualified to judge modern (read: post-1984) Lisp-family languages, probably having 100% of their exposure come from a one-hour lecture and small homework assignment in a programming languages course taught by someone who thought that Common Lisp is a single-paradigm functional language.
It already could, through parenscript.
I would argue that parking meter enforcement's merits are unrelated to profit or loss of the operation. If the purpose of parking meters is to increase parking space turnaround so that more people are able to park in a certain area, such as a congested downtown commercial district, then that purpose is met as long as drivers are sufficiently incentivized to give up parking spaces after a reasonable amount of time (either by the cost of paying the meter for more time or by the expected cost of parking tickets (probability of receiving a ticket times dollar figure on the ticket). Similarly, speeding enforcement on highways is supposed to be about making the roads safer rather than making a profit for the government. Of course, the justifiable purposes of doing something rarely and only briefly have anything to do with the real purposes at work.