You are correct, the time lost in incarceration is irrevocable. but unlike death, incarceration can be ended when and error is discovered. Your reasoning is sort of an all or nothing fallacy. "If the accused is losing some of their life that cannot be recovered, isn't it just as bad as losing all of their life?". If you really were in favor of ending murder, wouldn't the logical course of action be to exterminate the whole human race? Sure, billions would die, but if we exist long enough, the number of people murdered will vastly exceed this horrendous death toll. Of course this is a silly suggestion, and I think that it illustrates that there is middle ground. Losing a decade of life due to an error might be acceptable, while complete loss of life might not.

You seem to bravely step forward into the role of the victim, but I suspect that if you were being really dragged down the hall to the gas chamber, that you would not be nearly as composed or as staunch in your belief. Who is actually willing to die forty years too soon because a deputy sheriff didn't seal an evidence bag properly? I have a number of things I would die for, but that sure ain't one of them.

I also find it very ironic that you think that life incarceration is much worse of a punishment than the death penalty. By that logic, wouldn't that support my argument against the death penalty, since incarceration is a 'worse' penalty, and therefore a better deterrent?

'capital punishment': clever, but nobody likes a spelling Nazi.

How many people's lives do you wish to use up in tax payments, keeping alive a mass murderer?

Your argument is based on the false assumption that it is cheap to kill someone and expensive to throw them in a cement box for 80 years. It is in fact, many times more expensive to put someone to death than it is to lock them up, because the stakes are so much higher. Also, I really like how you subtly colored your question by calling the convict a mass murder, suggesting that there is no question that the convict isn't actually innocent.

This isn't Soviet Russian, comrade. We don't haul the accused behind the coal shed, and shoot them in the back of the head with a Luger to save time and expense. (You like how I subtily mixed my metaphors, by describing a soviet style political execution with a pistol from Nazi Germany? I made the reader think of two types of immoral criminal governments and associated them with capitol punishment. I like this game....its more fun that using pure logic to debate!)

Every decision in life is based on incomplete information. That doesn't mean we should be frozen into inaction until all data is certain.

It sure as hell does when you are considering end someone's life. This isn't a trivial decision like, 'It's icy out today, I wonder if I should drive to the store to get some milk?".

I was about to say, this would be a perfect OS for use in the USA, because the NSA will be completely locked out. Sure, the politburo would know all about your applesauce cupcakes recipe, but that's the price of freedom from domestic oppression, right?

But then I got to thinking, a few years back there was a NIX branch that the NSA created or approved that was hardened out of the box, presumably to be used internal to the NSA and other alphabet soup groups. One would think that they wouldn't be crazy enough to backdoor their own system, so this might be a wonderfully secure system to keep the NSA fucks off your box...

If we can me completely certain that there never will be an error in a capitol crime sentencing, I would advocate immediately dropping the killer in a wood chipper head first. However, being as there is always going to be some error in the legal system the question we should be asking is, "How many innocent people are we willing to murder in the name of revenge/justice?"

Because, until you get to that 100%, and never make an error, that is what you are doing. You are murdering people because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, are the wrong skin color, or cannot afford a good lawyer. At least if you screw up a life in prison sentence, you can let the person out in a decade or two when the truth comes to light.

There is a great bullshit test I came up with to give to someone who advocates capitol punishment. Ask them if our court system is 100% perfect in convicting the guilty. Then ask them if that means that means that we are murdering at least a few of the wrong people with capitol punishment. Then ask them if they would still feel that capitol punishment was fair and just if they were one of those people that was selected to die. Then ask them if they still support capitol punishment. If they say still yes, they are lying.

Start with impeaching these judges. Then work your way down.

Impeach? No, these tools should be dragged from their courts, horse whipped, and thrown in the deepest darkest prison cell we can find on charges of treason. The lack of immediate action against the NSA, the secret courts, and all the affiliated lackeys that help set up this system is shocking. And I say treason, because these people have done more to damage and weaken the United States than any soviet spy ever did. They have systematically and brazenly violated the constitutional rights of every single person in the country. And they knew how illegal this whole program is, and did it anyway. They are truly dangerous individuals.

If America is ever brought down it will be from within, not without. And people like this are the well intending scumbags that will be responsible.

You are hitting on something important here: No language is going to prevent a coder from doing blitheringly stupid things. But on the whole, C++ has a much higher bar to entry, and I will generalize here, in saying that your average C++ dev is probably going to code circles around the average Java mook.

I grew up writing C++ and ASM, and I now professional work with managed code so I have seen both sides of the street. Managed code makes a lot of things much simpler, and if you are skilled, it makes it faster to accomplish some tasks. This simplicity also makes it possible for idiots to do things that they have no understanding of. Don't believe me? Go look at the quality of code produced professional visual basic coder (even more 'dumbed down' than most managed code) and compare it to the output of C++ dev.

C++ is a better language because it requires a more skilled dev to use.

...or you just set the rpg on a tripod, point it at a road, and fire by wire remotely. It cannot be jammed and there is no risk to the shooter. Who cares if they shoot your launcher?

It will be even more depressing than that...you can't identify religious affiliation visually:

while(target.skincolor < 0.5) {....

I think that there is a difference, though. It is one thing to create unrelated technology that when linked together is dangerous. It is another thing to just create technology that doesn't have an application outside of killing people. By your argument, every invention all they way back to using flint and tinder to create fire is nothing but a weapon, and why should we even have bothered?

My prediction is that this technology will float about the edge of popular awareness, until an unbalanced individual sets up a KILLMAX(tm) brand 'smartgun perimeter defense turret' in an elementary school and murders a bunch of children and escapes because he didn't have to be on the scene. Then national outrage will lead to mass bans on such weapons.

Should we be making such weapons? I don't know, I suppose that the argument can be made that they fill the same role as land mines, but have the upside that there is less problem with getting rid of them when the fighting stops. I find the glee we as a species have in building better was of killing each other to be really depressing on the whole.

The rubber sheet (simple thing that 'uneducated' people understand) is a way of explaining the curvature of 4d space/time by mass (complicated thing that really requires a graduate level math degree to do anything meaningful with) by dropping down to 2d space. For what it is intended to do, it is a wonderful tool.

I always imagined 3d space with fluctuating 'density' gradients when I think of relativistic effects. Imagine being in a pool, where some of the water was was really dense or thick, and took great effort to swim through.

Here is the problem though. Lets say that you vote republican, because they field a intelligent, conservative who believes in rational conservative fiscal policy (BWHAAHAHAAAAA, I know, right?) and you vote him in to congress or the senate. The next time a abortion ban or a tax on filth poor people comes up, the house wip comes marching up and threatens to cut party support unless he/she votes the party line.

The party is as much a lobbyist with immense fiscal power as any special interest. Unless party power is broken, you are going to be voting the party into an office, and not as much an individual.

Other simple solution: Make outer mortar case out of ceramic. Mirrors and reflective materials don't work, so rather than reflect the laser, just absorb the energy. Ceramic can be made hard, cheap, and is a wonderful heat sink. Common formulas will work, but if needed, you can make ceramic shells out of the same stuff that they put on the space shuttle as reentry tiles.

Simpler solution: Formulate your explosive to produce a lot of smoke on ignition, so that if a single mortar is destroyed mid flight, you have just deployed a smoke screen that is more difficult for the laser to cut through. Then when you call in a mortar fire mission, the first three rounds are destroyed mid flight, and the laser is then useless to target anything on the flight path until the smoke dissipates.

Science hasn't "disproven" the existence of *any* supernatural being, just as it hasn't "proven" the existence either.

Science doesn't have to disprove their existence. The basic idea behind science is pretty simple: prove it or it isn't real. As soon as your system of though allows any claim to be made with out verification, sanity goes out the window. In science, were I to claim that PI = 3, I would be laughed at as a quack and an idiot, and yet people can claim that there is an ancient jewish zombie and an invisible sky bully that rule the universe and nobody will call them out for being bald faced liars.

The numbers are low, because herd immunity is still strong. The reason for concern is that the infection rate curve probably isn't linear. At some point on the curve there is going to be an inflection point where a lot of people will start getting sick. So, while there are probably things that are currently causing a lot more child deaths now, this is could change quickly.