Thats why prisons are not places of rehabilitation (PMITA is even a commonly understood acronym!), they are places of punishment, and that is not likely to change any time soon.
You obviously haven't been to Canada. Our government tried to make prisons into places of rehabilitation instead of places of punishment, and instead ended up with "places of rehabilitation", which is to say neither. We simply don't understand human psychology well enough to turn prisons into reliable places of rehabilitation, and your post is a case in point.
Law is not "a sanctioned instrument of vengeance", law is the threat of force used in order to encourage a code of conduct. For instance, civil law as pertaining to contractual obligations between two parties is a way to ensure both parties meet the terms that they agreed to. It's the state offering to use it's force in order to ensure that both parties meet the contract. It has nothing to do with vengeance, and everything to do with getting people to act the way we want them to act. If we didn't have government and police doing it for us, we'd simply have to do it for ourselves. Take a look at the criminal element in any major city, and you'll see an example of that. Since gangs cannot go to a police officer in order to report 5 kilos of stolen crack cocaine, they use the threat of force to control those who would steal from them. The gang that routinely beats the living crap out of anyone who tries to screw them will generally have less problems than one which allows others to attack them without consequence. It has very little to do with vengeance.
I know that insulting Americans is the "cool" thing to do these days, but give it a rest. Democracy got it's start in the US, and US intervention helped keep you from living in a fascist state. You don't have to like them, but you don't have to be such a pathetic, hateful little bastard either.
Do you know what I see as being a BIG problem? The way the Constitution was originally created was that the federal government couldn't do anything unless it was expressly told so but now it effing thinks it can do anything it wants unless it's expressly told it can't.
And whose fault is that? The whole problem is that people only give a shit about federal politics. The constitution placed so many limits on the federal government precisely because it was supposed to be little more than a forum where state representatives could talk, argue, debate, and otherwise air their grievances and come to agreements with each other. Think of it as a mini-UN - mostly powerless, but a good forum for debate. If people had stayed focused on their local politics and kept electing reasonable politicians at the state level, you wouldn't have these problems. The kind of nonsense we saw during Katrina, where everyone took one giant collective shit on G.W. Bush while letting the Mayor and Governor off scott free, is exactly what's causing the problems you're talking about.
Well yes, if you combust it, it's comparable to gasoline, but if you're burning it you're still creating pollution. One of the main draws of hydrogen fuel cell technology is that it doesn't release any pollutants. What's the point of using hydrogen if you're going to burn it?
The other system you speak of is simple electrolysis, and is also extremely inefficient. You can power it using solar panels, or use the grid, but either way you get very low efficiency as opposed to, say, charging a battery. And the BIG problem with trying to use an electrolysis system at home is that you'd also need some way to liquefy the hydrogen. Otherwise, if you're storing it in a gaseous state, the average gas tank would take you maybe 80 miles if you're lucky.
My main point is that, for most consumer vehicles, batteries would be much more efficient than a hydrogen system. For instance, the Tesla Roadster uses a rechargeable battery pack, and is able to achieve a range of 250 miles per charge. Of course the big problem with battery powered cars is that they require time to recharge - in the case of the Tesla roadster, a full charge takes about 3 hours. This could be rather inconvenient if you're planning a 2,000 mile road-trip. But the overall efficiency is a hell of a lot better than any hydrogen vehicle, and the cost-per-mile is astronomically lower. A hydrogen vehicle would initially be more expensive to operate than a gasoline powered vehicle, and would at best at some point in the future achieve parity. So you'd still be paying the equivalent of $2.80 a gallon, or whatever you yanks are paying these days. Whereas with a battery powered car you'd be looking at spending between $0.01 and $0.05 per mile. For the average vehicle that'd be the equivalent of between $0.30 and $1.50 per gallon. Like I said, it's a HUGE difference.
You're not getting the big picture here. I never argued against alternate energy sources, what I'm saying is that even if 100% of your energy sources are clean, you're going to require 4 times as much infrastructure if you use a storage system that's only 25% efficient as opposed to 100% efficient. Of course, there's no such thing as 100% efficiency, but even if you have a storage system that's only 75% efficient, that's still 3 times less infrastructure than what you'd need for hydrogen. Having to build 3 windmills instead of 1 just because you have a crappy storage system is NOT a good deal. Not to mention the problem of trying to keep hydrogen in a liquid, and the extra precautions required to keep it safe in case of accidents. We should be working on developing better batteries, not trying to convert to hydrogen.
Normal people dont get excited about operating systems. PC's are either tools or toys to them. Getting another operating systems is about as exciting as changing the wash cycle in their dishwasher for most people.
Nonsense. I usually carry around two mini-CD's, one with Slax, and one with BartPE, plus a memory stick with just about every application you could ever need. Every time I put one of those tiny disks into a machine that "doesn't work", and have a fully functional GUI 2 minutes later, people get real excited. That kind of stuff is cool even for the "non-geeks", and they get even more amazed when I start doing things like cracking their SAM database:)
And when plain old boring police work fails, you're up in arms over incompetence. Either that, or conspiracy idiots are yelling that it must be an inside jobs because muslims are too stupid to pull it off. There's just no pleasing people.
And where is this 100% renewable energy going to come from? Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to build a wind turbine? How much energy it takes to produce solar panels? All of THAT energy comes from fossil fuels. Fuel to forge the steel. Fuel to make silicone. Fuel to transport and install the materials. Hell, even oil for the ball-bearings on the turbines. So you're spending energy, and therefore polluting, to build all this infrastructure...and now thanks to the wonders of hydrogen, you need to spend 4 times as much resources, and produce 4 times the pollution, because you need 4 times the infrastructure. Not exactly what I'd call a great deal.
Nope, sorry, my mistake. I was running that experimental slashdot interface, and it seems to have chosen today to expire/die in spectacular fashion. Now that I've disabled it, everything looks right again.
Yes you goddamn tree hugging sandal wearing long haired freak, because no matter what YOU may think the real "bad guys" aren't the ones in the white house and the pentagon. The real "bad guys" are the ones who'd gladly chop your fucking head off for daring to smoke that joint.
Once again, he died of C-A-N-C-E-R. The US penal system does not execute people by giving them cancer. He died of natural causes. If he had been executed and then exonerated, you may have a case, but that's not what happened.
It's the open-source model. I'm sure there's a market for free music consisting of several thousand people simultaneously screaming into a microphone and playing random instruments. You can call it "MUbuntu".
Uh. He died of cancer. Did you not bother to read the bit you quoted? Or are you of the opinion that we now execute criminals by giving them cancer? How exactly would that work? Make them smoke a carton of cigarettes every day for a decade or so?
Re:If you've ever seen how fast a fire moves...
on
Arson Science Rewritten
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, technically, once a person is executed it becomes impossible to "prove" his innocence because no further trial will ever be conducted. It's rather pointless to put a corpse in the defendants chair.
On the other hand, you're right. While there are a few cases of people on death row being proven innocent, and many more cases of death row inmates having their sentence commuted, there has never been a case of significant evidence coming to light of an inmates innocence after he had already been executed. This is largely due to the massive appeal process which every death row inmate goes through.
Actually, that's exactly why the US SHOULDN'T give away the source. You really think the Cylons could have disabled the Vipers if they'd never gotten their hands on the code? Not bloody likely. You give the code to the Brits, they leak it to the Saudis, they sell it to the Iranians, and next thing you know there's JSF's falling out of the sky because some Iranian script kiddie found a buffer overflow in the stability control portion of the program. And despite what a few paranoid mental patients (and you seem to fit into that category) may think, the UK is a lot more likely to go to war beside the US than against them.
Introduce John Quincy Adams to modern globalist politics. Show him a stealth bomber. Explain to him the functioning of a nuclear weapon. Show him a video of a Jihadi.
Awesome post, but you're wrong about one thing: it CAN be done peacefully, it just takes a LOT of time. It's like teaching a dog not to shit on your carpet...you can shove his face in it and smack him hard a few times, or you can keep saying "no!" a million times, and withholding treats. Both methods work, one just takes a lot more time and patience. Unfortunately the US people and media have absolutely zero patience.
The reason "things are bad", as you so quaintly put it, is because the "insurgent" scum have no problem with slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, while western soldiers get blamed every time an Iraqi slips on a bullet casing and twists his ankle. Advanced technology already helps us keep our own deaths low while inflicting much higher casualties on the opposition, however, if we wanted to go on a mass murder rampage the way our opponents are doing, then you'd see those high-tech weapons making a massive difference. And if people like you continue to have their way, we WILL go back to the old way of fighting wars within the next decade. Which is rather sad, really. Yet another example of misplaced idealism causing greater harm than the evils it's trying to oppose.
If you would have been alive before WW2, you would have been saying the same shit. The American people were strongly opposed to involvement in WW2, until the US got hit. Your ilk has ALWAYS been too blind to see the looming threat, and will ALWAYS keep repeating the same delusional nonsense until it's too damn late. The only reason you've manged not to breed yourselves into extinction is because people like me have always been around to come to your rescue. So go on. Keep making your excuse, keep telling yourself that everything is just peachy, and that nobody would ever want to harm a hair on your head. Me, I'll keep my rifle ready, my eyes peeled, and my engine running. You don't need to understand me or what I do. Just stay the fuck out of my way.
Right. And if it was YOUR 7 year old daughter lying dead in the street, you'd be cursing us for not doing anything to stop it. People like you disgust me. You've tucked yourself away into the security blanket of western dominance, and feel morally outraged that people like me dare use force in order to protect our way of life. Well fuck you. The only reason you can criticize me is because of the freedoms I provide you with. You're so morally bankrupt that I find more in common with some of our enemies than I do with the likes of you.
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Law is not "a sanctioned instrument of vengeance", law is the threat of force used in order to encourage a code of conduct. For instance, civil law as pertaining to contractual obligations between two parties is a way to ensure both parties meet the terms that they agreed to. It's the state offering to use it's force in order to ensure that both parties meet the contract. It has nothing to do with vengeance, and everything to do with getting people to act the way we want them to act. If we didn't have government and police doing it for us, we'd simply have to do it for ourselves. Take a look at the criminal element in any major city, and you'll see an example of that. Since gangs cannot go to a police officer in order to report 5 kilos of stolen crack cocaine, they use the threat of force to control those who would steal from them. The gang that routinely beats the living crap out of anyone who tries to screw them will generally have less problems than one which allows others to attack them without consequence. It has very little to do with vengeance.
I think what you meant to say is:
"I don't know - but I'm too lazy to look it up, so I'll just say 'yes' and blame it on lazy cops".
No, that's just your own body-odour.
I know that insulting Americans is the "cool" thing to do these days, but give it a rest. Democracy got it's start in the US, and US intervention helped keep you from living in a fascist state. You don't have to like them, but you don't have to be such a pathetic, hateful little bastard either.
Well yes, if you combust it, it's comparable to gasoline, but if you're burning it you're still creating pollution. One of the main draws of hydrogen fuel cell technology is that it doesn't release any pollutants. What's the point of using hydrogen if you're going to burn it?
The other system you speak of is simple electrolysis, and is also extremely inefficient. You can power it using solar panels, or use the grid, but either way you get very low efficiency as opposed to, say, charging a battery. And the BIG problem with trying to use an electrolysis system at home is that you'd also need some way to liquefy the hydrogen. Otherwise, if you're storing it in a gaseous state, the average gas tank would take you maybe 80 miles if you're lucky.
My main point is that, for most consumer vehicles, batteries would be much more efficient than a hydrogen system. For instance, the Tesla Roadster uses a rechargeable battery pack, and is able to achieve a range of 250 miles per charge. Of course the big problem with battery powered cars is that they require time to recharge - in the case of the Tesla roadster, a full charge takes about 3 hours. This could be rather inconvenient if you're planning a 2,000 mile road-trip. But the overall efficiency is a hell of a lot better than any hydrogen vehicle, and the cost-per-mile is astronomically lower. A hydrogen vehicle would initially be more expensive to operate than a gasoline powered vehicle, and would at best at some point in the future achieve parity. So you'd still be paying the equivalent of $2.80 a gallon, or whatever you yanks are paying these days. Whereas with a battery powered car you'd be looking at spending between $0.01 and $0.05 per mile. For the average vehicle that'd be the equivalent of between $0.30 and $1.50 per gallon. Like I said, it's a HUGE difference.
You're not getting the big picture here. I never argued against alternate energy sources, what I'm saying is that even if 100% of your energy sources are clean, you're going to require 4 times as much infrastructure if you use a storage system that's only 25% efficient as opposed to 100% efficient. Of course, there's no such thing as 100% efficiency, but even if you have a storage system that's only 75% efficient, that's still 3 times less infrastructure than what you'd need for hydrogen. Having to build 3 windmills instead of 1 just because you have a crappy storage system is NOT a good deal. Not to mention the problem of trying to keep hydrogen in a liquid, and the extra precautions required to keep it safe in case of accidents. We should be working on developing better batteries, not trying to convert to hydrogen.
And when plain old boring police work fails, you're up in arms over incompetence. Either that, or conspiracy idiots are yelling that it must be an inside jobs because muslims are too stupid to pull it off. There's just no pleasing people.
And where is this 100% renewable energy going to come from? Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to build a wind turbine? How much energy it takes to produce solar panels? All of THAT energy comes from fossil fuels. Fuel to forge the steel. Fuel to make silicone. Fuel to transport and install the materials. Hell, even oil for the ball-bearings on the turbines. So you're spending energy, and therefore polluting, to build all this infrastructure...and now thanks to the wonders of hydrogen, you need to spend 4 times as much resources, and produce 4 times the pollution, because you need 4 times the infrastructure. Not exactly what I'd call a great deal.
"Of course, there could be problems, but one thing I've found is most people aren't total dumb-asses"
Wow. What universe do YOU live in?
Nope, sorry, my mistake. I was running that experimental slashdot interface, and it seems to have chosen today to expire/die in spectacular fashion. Now that I've disabled it, everything looks right again.
Yes you goddamn tree hugging sandal wearing long haired freak, because no matter what YOU may think the real "bad guys" aren't the ones in the white house and the pentagon. The real "bad guys" are the ones who'd gladly chop your fucking head off for daring to smoke that joint.
Ah yes, preparedness + politics = dictatorship. Man, NASA really tubed it when they turned down your application....
And that's relevant because.....?
Once again, he died of C-A-N-C-E-R. The US penal system does not execute people by giving them cancer. He died of natural causes. If he had been executed and then exonerated, you may have a case, but that's not what happened.
It's the open-source model. I'm sure there's a market for free music consisting of several thousand people simultaneously screaming into a microphone and playing random instruments. You can call it "MUbuntu".
Uh. He died of cancer. Did you not bother to read the bit you quoted? Or are you of the opinion that we now execute criminals by giving them cancer? How exactly would that work? Make them smoke a carton of cigarettes every day for a decade or so?
Well, technically, once a person is executed it becomes impossible to "prove" his innocence because no further trial will ever be conducted. It's rather pointless to put a corpse in the defendants chair.
On the other hand, you're right. While there are a few cases of people on death row being proven innocent, and many more cases of death row inmates having their sentence commuted, there has never been a case of significant evidence coming to light of an inmates innocence after he had already been executed. This is largely due to the massive appeal process which every death row inmate goes through.
Actually, that's exactly why the US SHOULDN'T give away the source. You really think the Cylons could have disabled the Vipers if they'd never gotten their hands on the code? Not bloody likely. You give the code to the Brits, they leak it to the Saudis, they sell it to the Iranians, and next thing you know there's JSF's falling out of the sky because some Iranian script kiddie found a buffer overflow in the stability control portion of the program. And despite what a few paranoid mental patients (and you seem to fit into that category) may think, the UK is a lot more likely to go to war beside the US than against them.
Introduce John Quincy Adams to modern globalist politics. Show him a stealth bomber. Explain to him the functioning of a nuclear weapon. Show him a video of a Jihadi.
THEN see what he says.
Awesome post, but you're wrong about one thing: it CAN be done peacefully, it just takes a LOT of time. It's like teaching a dog not to shit on your carpet...you can shove his face in it and smack him hard a few times, or you can keep saying "no!" a million times, and withholding treats. Both methods work, one just takes a lot more time and patience. Unfortunately the US people and media have absolutely zero patience.
The reason "things are bad", as you so quaintly put it, is because the "insurgent" scum have no problem with slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, while western soldiers get blamed every time an Iraqi slips on a bullet casing and twists his ankle. Advanced technology already helps us keep our own deaths low while inflicting much higher casualties on the opposition, however, if we wanted to go on a mass murder rampage the way our opponents are doing, then you'd see those high-tech weapons making a massive difference. And if people like you continue to have their way, we WILL go back to the old way of fighting wars within the next decade. Which is rather sad, really. Yet another example of misplaced idealism causing greater harm than the evils it's trying to oppose.
heh. I guess South Park was right: 25% of people really ARE retarded.
Who actually uses Yahoo any more, anyway?
If you would have been alive before WW2, you would have been saying the same shit. The American people were strongly opposed to involvement in WW2, until the US got hit. Your ilk has ALWAYS been too blind to see the looming threat, and will ALWAYS keep repeating the same delusional nonsense until it's too damn late. The only reason you've manged not to breed yourselves into extinction is because people like me have always been around to come to your rescue. So go on. Keep making your excuse, keep telling yourself that everything is just peachy, and that nobody would ever want to harm a hair on your head. Me, I'll keep my rifle ready, my eyes peeled, and my engine running. You don't need to understand me or what I do. Just stay the fuck out of my way.
Right. And if it was YOUR 7 year old daughter lying dead in the street, you'd be cursing us for not doing anything to stop it. People like you disgust me. You've tucked yourself away into the security blanket of western dominance, and feel morally outraged that people like me dare use force in order to protect our way of life. Well fuck you. The only reason you can criticize me is because of the freedoms I provide you with. You're so morally bankrupt that I find more in common with some of our enemies than I do with the likes of you.