Fortunately, there is a handy solution to your predicament of what to do when you can't prove guilt, but cannot prove innocence either. It's called proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and it's part of the legal code. If there is a reasonable doubt of guilt, the rule says you acquit.
Yes, that does mean that a few guilty men will go free, but the inverse of that (prove that you are innocent) is far, far worse.
One of my favorite authors uses a very clever form of the "try-before-you-buy" approach to drive interest and sales: he puts the audio versions of his books out on the internet for free, and then sells the hardcover and ebook versions to make money. It got him on to the New York TImes bestsellers list, and I myself bought quite a few books after getting hooked.
In case you're serious, how exactly do you propose we select the students we should teach it to? Assign future careers to young kids ahead of time? Ask little kids what they want to be and never try to broaden their horizons? Look into a crystal ball and see what they became in the future? Do tell me more about how you envision leaving large swaths of students in intellectual darkness in order to avoid "wasting time".
It was an... interesting story. It's not often I get to peer beneath someone's tin-foil hat to gaze upon unadulterated paranoia.
The author basically contends that the only reason people don't hunt each other for sport on the highways is because we're afraid of getting hurt in the process. Remove that impediment, and people will go out of their way to kill other motorists as a way of blowing off steam.
The thing is, that kind of murder is already quite doable... anyone can plant roadside bombs on poorly policed roads to take out other motorists with minimal danger to themselves. The reason people don't regularly do this (outside of war zones) is because most people aren't actually murderers at heart. Killing for sport is the mark of a psychopath... an abnormal mentality.
Once you remove human occupants, things get interesting. I'll be curious to see the accident rate for robotic cars once they really get out there. Why not rear-end the robotic car in the hopes of getting a big payout?
Because people can make mistakes, especially when they get into high-adrenaline situations like fights for survival (see Zimmerman, George, for a recent example). Someone who thinks his life is in danger isn't going to be the best judge of how well armed his opponent is, or whether he's even attacking the right guy... I can easily see someone picking the wrong target for their zealous self-defense and harming a perfectly innocent by-stander. Police do it all the time, and they've got the benefit of training and experience.
Mind you, I'm all for robust self-defense, especially in situations where your attacker has entered your home or if they have you cornered. Where you step over the line is in advocating "destroying" your attacker, instead of merely doing what is necessary to protect yourself. No man should have the power to be cop, judge, jury, and executioner... there's a reason civilized countries have different people for each of those roles.
Much like the early voyages of discovery that put America on the map were a waste, right? Why waste money on exploration when there are petty tribal wars to be fought?
NASA's budget is a rounding error compared to the military's budget, and yet I would put "landing a man on the moon" far higher than "My Lai" on the list of things America can be proud of. If exploration of space is a waste, then count me and millions of others as an ardent supporter of that kind of waste.
I agree... the best way to respond to past atrocities is to indiscriminately kill thousands of innocent civilians. Terrorism is justified when we do it, right?
Sadly, the risk doesn't just hit the children of the parents who chose not to vaccinate, it also affects those children who cannot be vaccinated due to complicating factors... children who would have been protected if herd immunity had not been compromised.
The bastards who spread with autism-vaccination lie should be in jail for complicity to murder.
I have witnessed violent crime before, and I fully support neighborhoods having programs like neighborhood watch (which, incidentally, tell their volunteers to call the police, not to confront suspects). I am also in favor of civilians owning firearms for self-defense (for cases like home invasion). However, I am absolutely against vigilantes trying to play cop, for the reasons that the Zimmerman case makes abundantly clear.
It takes an awful lot of training to teach a person how to use a firearm responsibly, how to properly identify suspicious behavior, and how to take control of a situation without having to resort to lethal force. There's a reason why police go through years of training, and why there is a selection process to weed out people with mental issues, and even with all that, there are plenty of cases of police screwing up. Allowing anyone to play cop with no real training or selection is a recipe for disaster.
Neighborhood watch programs explicitly forbid the watchmen from trying to confront suspects... they are instead supposed call the actual police, and alert neighbors to the possible threat.
By the way, nice attempt to portray Martin as "trespassing the neighborhood"... he was staying with family members who lived there, you idiot.
Sony's rootkit only hurt those people who paid for the CD (the "real customers"). Hackers and pirates, who didn't buy the physical CD, were largely unaffected. Malware authors loved it, because Sony's rootkit opened up a new avenue of attack on the compromised machines of the suckers who paid for it.
You use "hackers" as if it were a pejorative term... to me a hacker is a tinkerer, a tech enthusiast. By pissing off the hackers, Sony has managed to make enemies of the people who used to be its best customers. People like me used to convince others to buy Sony's stuff... now I will go out of my way to convince friends and family not to buy anything made by that piece of shit company.
Enraging nerds like me might not be directly responsible for Sony's damaged reputation and record losses, but it certainly hasn't helped them.
I set out to look for information to refute your claims of the abnormal quantity and quality of violence in South Africa, because I didn't want to believe your post could be true. Instead I only found information confirming that South Africa has major problems with rape and murder, from pretty reliable sources like the UN and Interpol.
How exactly would you distribute the hydrogen? You can't pipe it over long distances... the gas would seep right through the walls of the pipe, and embrittle the metal in the process. Trucking it isn't an option either... it would take more energy to compress, liquify, and haul it around in heavy explosion-proof cylinders than the energy content of the hydrogen itself.
I suppose you could distribute the methane, and produce the hydrogen locally via steam reformation, but that process still requires net input of energy... you're better off just burning the methane directly than trying to use it to produce hydrogen. You're not saving on CO2 emissions... if anything the extra energy required for steam reformation would mean you're producing more CO2 than if you just burn methane, not less.
How about electrolysis? Even worse, from an energy return on investment... you're taking a high-quality form of energy (electricity) and wasting most of it to produce a inefficient (and less safe) carrier. Electric motors are 90% efficient... combustion motors are more like 30%, and the conversion process from electricity to hydrogen has an even bigger loss penalty.
Electricity is easier and safer to transport over long distances, can be used to power engines more efficiently, and we've already got the distribution infrastructure everywhere, going right up to the home. Why the hell would we bother with an unproven, less safe, less efficient, and more expensive transport mechanism like hydrogen, particularly when the end result would be even more damaging to the environment?
Right on! Because "human rights violations", "child worker exploitation" and "abhorrent working conditions" are things only those sissy bleeding-heart liberals could care about.
Real men turn a blind eye to the problems affecting those sub-human foreigners. Better still, mock anyone who might want to help... stupid goth gay hipsters.
The fact that the US was willing to invade Iraq in 2003 is pretty strong evidence that the Bush administration didn't actually believe their story about Iraq possessing WMDs. If Iraq had succeeded in building such weapons, they would have fallen in the "too dangerous to invade" category, a la North Korea.
Ironically, the Iraq war has given Iran additional motive and opportunity to pursue nuclear weapons. Motive, because they see what happens to countries that don't have the nuclear trump card, and opportunity, because the US is too exhausted by the Iraq debacle to contemplate another major intervention for at least the next few years.
Shoot... this discussion had me thinking about the few season 1 episodes which I really liked, and "Where No One Has Gone Before" was actually my favorite. I'll give you a moment to stop laughing and wipe off your screen...
I loved that episode because it captured a sense of wonder, the excitement of getting to explore the universe in an amazing ship. The crew of the Enterprise were explorers, pushing to the boundaries of the universe and of human experience. The episode hinted at the limitless possibilities just waiting to be discovered once humanity progresses far enough.
It was that sense of wonder and possibility that makes me love seasons 1 and 2, in spite of the poor acting and hit-and-miss writing. The crew reflected the same excitement I felt as a small child thinking about how cool it would be to travel between the stars, to explore, to push the limits. The later seasons had better acting and better writing, but they lost some of that sparkle.
I can understand why you'd put ideological media like MSNBC on that list, but NPR... seriously? How is NPR "even worse" than Fox? The average NPR listener scores the highest on being able to correctly answer factual questions about world events (such as "have the opposition groups protesting in Egypt been successful in bringing down the regime there?"). FYI, Fox viewers not only scored lowest on such factual questions, they scored LOWER than those who don't watch news at all! (To be fair, MSNBC viewers were the next least-informed, but they still scored substantially better than Fox's victi^H^H^H viewers.)
That's a horrible idea. America is already in trouble because we've become a nation of consumers instead of manufacturers... just about the only advantage we have left is a slight lead in innovation.
Becoming a leader in alternative energy technologies could have enormous benefits for America, such as reversing the dynamic of wealth flowing out of the country in exchange for foreign energy. I'd much rather put American scientists and engineers to work on the problem rather than getting foreign experts to build it for us (and racking up debt by paying them with money we don't have).
Thank you for the very interesting link. It is indeed true that you can exceed the speed of light from the perspective of a distant observer... the only restriction is you cannot exceed the speed of light within your local space-time reference frame.
I like to think of space-time not as a sheet that gets warped, but as a dynamic, flowing thing, like a river. Space-time flows towards objects with mass, and free-falling objects are stationary with reference to the flowing space-time river. Standing on the surface of a planet means the space-time rushes past you towards the planet's center, so the act of standing still on the surface means you're moving relative to the flow of your local space-time. (Hence the act of standing in a gravity well versus flying in a ship at relativistic speeds are equivalent... both involve motion relative to the flow of space-time). The event horizon of a black hole is simply the place where the speed of the inflowing space-time equals the speed of light, and inside the black hole the space-time flow exceeds it.
The interesting question is what happens to the influx of space-time at the bottom of the gravity well, or at the singularity of a black hole? It obviously doesn't "pool up" like a physical substance (it's probably more akin to the flux of a magnetic field, "flowing" in the same sense), but it's got to be originating from somewhere.). I like to think there is probably a conservation of space-time, and that for all the space-time that disappears into a gravity well, the same amount gets added back into the overall space-time fabric, driving the expansion of the universe. It would be an interesting interpretation of dark energy.
Currently we believe they were far more stocky and muscular than modern humans (from looking at the way their muscles connected to the bones), and they appeared to be more robust (several severely fractured bones show signs of healing).
I think the most interesting difference is that their children appeared to mature faster than ours, taking only 11 years to become fully-grown. (I think the evidence for this is still debated). Even though interbreeding evidently took place, it seems to me they were nevertheless very different.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, there is a handy solution to your predicament of what to do when you can't prove guilt, but cannot prove innocence either. It's called proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and it's part of the legal code. If there is a reasonable doubt of guilt, the rule says you acquit.
Yes, that does mean that a few guilty men will go free, but the inverse of that (prove that you are innocent) is far, far worse.
Want to exterminate humanity? There's an app for that!
One of my favorite authors uses a very clever form of the "try-before-you-buy" approach to drive interest and sales: he puts the audio versions of his books out on the internet for free, and then sells the hardcover and ebook versions to make money. It got him on to the New York TImes bestsellers list, and I myself bought quite a few books after getting hooked.
You're joking, right?
In case you're serious, how exactly do you propose we select the students we should teach it to? Assign future careers to young kids ahead of time? Ask little kids what they want to be and never try to broaden their horizons? Look into a crystal ball and see what they became in the future? Do tell me more about how you envision leaving large swaths of students in intellectual darkness in order to avoid "wasting time".
It was an... interesting story. It's not often I get to peer beneath someone's tin-foil hat to gaze upon unadulterated paranoia.
The author basically contends that the only reason people don't hunt each other for sport on the highways is because we're afraid of getting hurt in the process. Remove that impediment, and people will go out of their way to kill other motorists as a way of blowing off steam.
The thing is, that kind of murder is already quite doable... anyone can plant roadside bombs on poorly policed roads to take out other motorists with minimal danger to themselves. The reason people don't regularly do this (outside of war zones) is because most people aren't actually murderers at heart. Killing for sport is the mark of a psychopath... an abnormal mentality.
Once you remove human occupants, things get interesting. I'll be curious to see the accident rate for robotic cars once they really get out there. Why not rear-end the robotic car in the hopes of getting a big payout?
Because people can make mistakes, especially when they get into high-adrenaline situations like fights for survival (see Zimmerman, George, for a recent example). Someone who thinks his life is in danger isn't going to be the best judge of how well armed his opponent is, or whether he's even attacking the right guy... I can easily see someone picking the wrong target for their zealous self-defense and harming a perfectly innocent by-stander. Police do it all the time, and they've got the benefit of training and experience.
Mind you, I'm all for robust self-defense, especially in situations where your attacker has entered your home or if they have you cornered. Where you step over the line is in advocating "destroying" your attacker, instead of merely doing what is necessary to protect yourself. No man should have the power to be cop, judge, jury, and executioner... there's a reason civilized countries have different people for each of those roles.
Much like the early voyages of discovery that put America on the map were a waste, right? Why waste money on exploration when there are petty tribal wars to be fought?
NASA's budget is a rounding error compared to the military's budget, and yet I would put "landing a man on the moon" far higher than "My Lai" on the list of things America can be proud of. If exploration of space is a waste, then count me and millions of others as an ardent supporter of that kind of waste.
I agree... the best way to respond to past atrocities is to indiscriminately kill thousands of innocent civilians. Terrorism is justified when we do it, right?
Sadly, the risk doesn't just hit the children of the parents who chose not to vaccinate, it also affects those children who cannot be vaccinated due to complicating factors... children who would have been protected if herd immunity had not been compromised.
The bastards who spread with autism-vaccination lie should be in jail for complicity to murder.
I have witnessed violent crime before, and I fully support neighborhoods having programs like neighborhood watch (which, incidentally, tell their volunteers to call the police, not to confront suspects). I am also in favor of civilians owning firearms for self-defense (for cases like home invasion). However, I am absolutely against vigilantes trying to play cop, for the reasons that the Zimmerman case makes abundantly clear.
It takes an awful lot of training to teach a person how to use a firearm responsibly, how to properly identify suspicious behavior, and how to take control of a situation without having to resort to lethal force. There's a reason why police go through years of training, and why there is a selection process to weed out people with mental issues, and even with all that, there are plenty of cases of police screwing up. Allowing anyone to play cop with no real training or selection is a recipe for disaster.
Neighborhood watch programs explicitly forbid the watchmen from trying to confront suspects... they are instead supposed call the actual police, and alert neighbors to the possible threat.
By the way, nice attempt to portray Martin as "trespassing the neighborhood"... he was staying with family members who lived there, you idiot.
So you're saying the problem is that Americans are a little slower. Huh...
Sony's rootkit only hurt those people who paid for the CD (the "real customers"). Hackers and pirates, who didn't buy the physical CD, were largely unaffected. Malware authors loved it, because Sony's rootkit opened up a new avenue of attack on the compromised machines of the suckers who paid for it.
You use "hackers" as if it were a pejorative term... to me a hacker is a tinkerer, a tech enthusiast. By pissing off the hackers, Sony has managed to make enemies of the people who used to be its best customers. People like me used to convince others to buy Sony's stuff... now I will go out of my way to convince friends and family not to buy anything made by that piece of shit company.
Enraging nerds like me might not be directly responsible for Sony's damaged reputation and record losses, but it certainly hasn't helped them.
I set out to look for information to refute your claims of the abnormal quantity and quality of violence in South Africa, because I didn't want to believe your post could be true. Instead I only found information confirming that South Africa has major problems with rape and murder, from pretty reliable sources like the UN and Interpol.
Wikipedia has a pretty decent summary of the issue, with lots of supporting references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_South_Africa
Stay safe, good sir.
How exactly would you distribute the hydrogen? You can't pipe it over long distances... the gas would seep right through the walls of the pipe, and embrittle the metal in the process. Trucking it isn't an option either... it would take more energy to compress, liquify, and haul it around in heavy explosion-proof cylinders than the energy content of the hydrogen itself.
I suppose you could distribute the methane, and produce the hydrogen locally via steam reformation, but that process still requires net input of energy... you're better off just burning the methane directly than trying to use it to produce hydrogen. You're not saving on CO2 emissions... if anything the extra energy required for steam reformation would mean you're producing more CO2 than if you just burn methane, not less.
How about electrolysis? Even worse, from an energy return on investment... you're taking a high-quality form of energy (electricity) and wasting most of it to produce a inefficient (and less safe) carrier. Electric motors are 90% efficient... combustion motors are more like 30%, and the conversion process from electricity to hydrogen has an even bigger loss penalty.
Electricity is easier and safer to transport over long distances, can be used to power engines more efficiently, and we've already got the distribution infrastructure everywhere, going right up to the home. Why the hell would we bother with an unproven, less safe, less efficient, and more expensive transport mechanism like hydrogen, particularly when the end result would be even more damaging to the environment?
Right on! Because "human rights violations", "child worker exploitation" and "abhorrent working conditions" are things only those sissy bleeding-heart liberals could care about.
Real men turn a blind eye to the problems affecting those sub-human foreigners. Better still, mock anyone who might want to help... stupid goth gay hipsters.
I wish I had mod points to give you.
The fact that the US was willing to invade Iraq in 2003 is pretty strong evidence that the Bush administration didn't actually believe their story about Iraq possessing WMDs. If Iraq had succeeded in building such weapons, they would have fallen in the "too dangerous to invade" category, a la North Korea.
Ironically, the Iraq war has given Iran additional motive and opportunity to pursue nuclear weapons. Motive, because they see what happens to countries that don't have the nuclear trump card, and opportunity, because the US is too exhausted by the Iraq debacle to contemplate another major intervention for at least the next few years.
Shoot... this discussion had me thinking about the few season 1 episodes which I really liked, and "Where No One Has Gone Before" was actually my favorite. I'll give you a moment to stop laughing and wipe off your screen...
I loved that episode because it captured a sense of wonder, the excitement of getting to explore the universe in an amazing ship. The crew of the Enterprise were explorers, pushing to the boundaries of the universe and of human experience. The episode hinted at the limitless possibilities just waiting to be discovered once humanity progresses far enough.
It was that sense of wonder and possibility that makes me love seasons 1 and 2, in spite of the poor acting and hit-and-miss writing. The crew reflected the same excitement I felt as a small child thinking about how cool it would be to travel between the stars, to explore, to push the limits. The later seasons had better acting and better writing, but they lost some of that sparkle.
Yes, and both first degree murder and manslaughter result in a corpse, but our justice system distinguishes between the two because motives matter.
I can understand why you'd put ideological media like MSNBC on that list, but NPR... seriously? How is NPR "even worse" than Fox? The average NPR listener scores the highest on being able to correctly answer factual questions about world events (such as "have the opposition groups protesting in Egypt been successful in bringing down the regime there?"). FYI, Fox viewers not only scored lowest on such factual questions, they scored LOWER than those who don't watch news at all! (To be fair, MSNBC viewers were the next least-informed, but they still scored substantially better than Fox's victi^H^H^H viewers.)
Here's the link to the study, in case you're interested: http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/
Next time, try listening to NPR before bashing it... you might actually learn something.
Did you really get the city to change your house number to 404'); DROP TABLE Streetnames;-- ?
That's a horrible idea. America is already in trouble because we've become a nation of consumers instead of manufacturers... just about the only advantage we have left is a slight lead in innovation.
Becoming a leader in alternative energy technologies could have enormous benefits for America, such as reversing the dynamic of wealth flowing out of the country in exchange for foreign energy. I'd much rather put American scientists and engineers to work on the problem rather than getting foreign experts to build it for us (and racking up debt by paying them with money we don't have).
I hope they make good on this threat. Eventually citizens will take a hard look at their leaders when they can no longer have nice things.
Thank you for the very interesting link. It is indeed true that you can exceed the speed of light from the perspective of a distant observer... the only restriction is you cannot exceed the speed of light within your local space-time reference frame.
I like to think of space-time not as a sheet that gets warped, but as a dynamic, flowing thing, like a river. Space-time flows towards objects with mass, and free-falling objects are stationary with reference to the flowing space-time river. Standing on the surface of a planet means the space-time rushes past you towards the planet's center, so the act of standing still on the surface means you're moving relative to the flow of your local space-time. (Hence the act of standing in a gravity well versus flying in a ship at relativistic speeds are equivalent... both involve motion relative to the flow of space-time). The event horizon of a black hole is simply the place where the speed of the inflowing space-time equals the speed of light, and inside the black hole the space-time flow exceeds it.
The interesting question is what happens to the influx of space-time at the bottom of the gravity well, or at the singularity of a black hole? It obviously doesn't "pool up" like a physical substance (it's probably more akin to the flux of a magnetic field, "flowing" in the same sense), but it's got to be originating from somewhere.). I like to think there is probably a conservation of space-time, and that for all the space-time that disappears into a gravity well, the same amount gets added back into the overall space-time fabric, driving the expansion of the universe. It would be an interesting interpretation of dark energy.
Currently we believe they were far more stocky and muscular than modern humans (from looking at the way their muscles connected to the bones), and they appeared to be more robust (several severely fractured bones show signs of healing).
I think the most interesting difference is that their children appeared to mature faster than ours, taking only 11 years to become fully-grown. (I think the evidence for this is still debated). Even though interbreeding evidently took place, it seems to me they were nevertheless very different.
> What we need here is a database of really bad analogies.
Dude, what do you think slashdot is?