The problem with saving those 100,000 lives is they won't be in the healthy productive years.

Oh, it's worse than that. You can do all sorts of preventative (but generally unpleasant) things during those healthy productive years which (statistically) add years to your life at the end. But then what have you really done? You've traded pleasure during the years when you can enjoy it for an extra few years of misery.

But the cop will straight-up murder you for that... so it might be best to let the lawyer fight that one for you.

Unfortunately, once you're in court without a recording of the incident, you've already lost; the cop will invent whatever narrative is necessary for a conviction, and the court will believe him over you even if there's circumstantial evidence otherwise. So depending on how much time you think spending in prison is equivalent to death, you might choose to take the quick death over the slow one.

If you're going to bother at all, don't just quote the penalty, quote the whole statute. It clearly states that intent to use the tools for a criminal purpose is required for prosecution.

Ha. They get around that by inferring bad intent from your possession.

"Leveling the playing field" is what is being said, but "evening the score" is a better fit for what is meant.

Nope. Good ideas die that way; bad ones keep getting pushed until they pass. Today it's shot down. Tomorrow it fails narrowly in the legislature. The day after that it passes, and a day after that everyone takes it as a given and doesn't understand how they ever lived without it.

Exactly. He doesn't need to do squat. He's implicitly selling the idea that he will be using all those secrets to help out his clients, but it's a flim-flam; he doesn't actually have to do it. And he was the head of the NSA, an administrator...what's the chance he knows much in the way of recent technical details anyway?

I don't know if the above poster was sincere or sarcastic, but this does illustrate a slippery slope. Nobody would care about bad eating habits, if they had decided, for example, to let everyone fend for themselves.

Those of us opposed to government-provided health care have been pointing this out for decades; that once you have the government providing health care, that can be used as an excuse to control everything and anything which could affect anyone's health. Of course proponents poo-poohed that and said we were paranoid and yelled "slippery slope fallacy".

I didn't say economic factors didn't matter; I said they weren't sufficient. Something like 33% of black households earn more than $50,000 per year, compared to 52% of white households. For $75,000 and up, it's 18% compared to 32%. For $100,000 and up, it's 9.3% compared to 20.1%.

So perhaps by economic factors alone you'd expect black tech workers to be under-represented by 50% compared to white people. Non-Hispanic black people make up 12% of the population, non-Hispanic white 64%. Facebook has 53% white people in tech, so you'd expect maybe 6% black people...actual number 1%.

Leveling the playing field isn't disadvantaging, though I can imagine some are upset that they are being called on their unearned privilege.

Unearned privilege... that's like original sin, right? Everyone white or male has it, and it's sufficient unto itself to justify any punishment which may be dished out.

Yeah, at least until you invent baptism, I don't think I'll be subscribing to your philosophy.

So if American Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented in the Software Development field compared to the overall American population, one question to ask is, is it because Blacks and Hispanics are "simply not interested" in Software Development, or is it because they generally come from less affluent backgrounds, in school districts that cannot afford to provide the same resources toward educating and encouraging students who might otherwise be interested in these fields?

I believe you'll find the difference, at least for blacks is not fully explainable by economic factors. There is a significant middle-and-upper-class black population.

The reason some people care about equal access and encouragement for STEM fields (as opposed to, say, food service) is that they pay extremely well and yet, unlike sports, these careers are attainable by nearly anyone with determination and encouragement.

No, they really aren't. Just because the difference between a person with intelligence and talent and one without in more cerebral fields isn't as obvious as the difference between a person with talent in sports and one without doesn't mean the difference isn't there.

Non-hispanic whites are 64% of the US population, but only 57% of Facebook's employee base. White people are under-represented.

However, getting a STEM Ph.D. closes nearly all doors except becoming a researcher or teacher in your field.

Drug companies don't hire biology and chemistry PhDs? Chemical companies don't hire chemistry PhDs? Oil companies don't hire geology PhDs? Tech companies don't hire Computer Science PhDs (there sure seem to be a lot of them around my office if they're not working there)?

Tornados aren't like tsunamis or seismic waves. They don't start in some central location and travel great distances to smash puny human works. They typically form in thunderstorms, smash a few trailers, then dissipate. When they do damage over a wide area, it's usually because the same storm formed many tornadoes. So your pachinko array has two problems -- one, it would have to be everywhere. Two, the columns would have to be high enough to extend well into a thundercloud to disrupt funnel formation.