Your comments about it being religious in nature are interesting; I always thought that religion's traditional hatred of homosexuality gave it's adherents' an excuse to voice their petty hatred. "It's ok to hate faggots, because the Bible says so."

Religion is a great thing though, don't get me wrong. I love big shiny gold crosses worn as jewelry. It makes it easy for me to spot those primitive, savage idiots and stay the hell way from them. "I believe in invisible shit that nobody has ever even seen, Dhurrrrrrrrrr!"

you miss the point, he chose female as the gender of the tautology, which reinforces the stereotype that women are computer illiterate.

"your computer illiterate little sister".....

What makes you think that little sisters are more computer illiterate than little brothers? Sexist much, Jacob Miller?

A number of software companies are designed around the flat org structure, which is an interesting way of running things. Another idea is a rock-paper-scissors approach where no group has ultimate authority.

FIrst 'Beta Sucks!'

Please don't feed the trolls....

Ah everyone else is doing it, well that makes it ok....

One of the old 'rules' of espionage is that everybody spies, everybody knows everybody spies, and nobody talks about it. (everybody in this case, being national intelligence services). By creating such a massive systems that was bound to be discovered, the NSA has torpedoed US national interests in a spectacular fashion. Nobody trusts the US to behave as an altruistic custodian of the Internet now, and they have caused untold billions of dollars of economic damage to US companies. Ironically, it is quite likely that national networks will become more secure, making it harder to do any spying in cases where it might really be important. I have no problem at all in spying on anyone who isn't American, at least when it isn't a billion dollar waste of time tracking all the calls of Dutch house wives, French bus drivers, and Australian auto mechanics. They have created all sorts of mechanisms to get around the letter of the law preventing them from spying on their own citizens, in order to track Muslims who are brown skinned, most of whom just happen to not be connected to terrorist groups.

Basically these stupid NSA fucks got greedy and have killed the golden goose, and shredded no end of domestic laws to do it.

I think /. probably lost closely identifies with Libertarian ideals, with progressive social policy. Personally I can't stand half the libertarians I meet because they are just conservatives that are just a little less stupid than the average neocon troll.

I am a little fuzzy here, are you calling Snowden a traitor, for pointing out the vast, incredibly illegal spying program that has massively damaged US diplomatic and economic interests, or the NSA? Please clarify who needs to be shot....

Ah, no one can take constructive criticism anymore. I thought you would appreciate the chance to learn the correct term. I also thought you might appreciate that I waited until the end to mention this in passing rather than attempting to provoke an emotional response by taunting you. Would you have preferred I had left it to the AC trolls to just mock you and let you learn of your mistake that way? Well, I see from other posts that they delivered on that count...

Regardless, the correct form is easy to remember because "capital" refers to the head (e.g. "per capita")... ergo, "punishment on the head".

I am quite aware of the meanings of the words, and how they differ. I care not what an AC posts, they aren't worth reading let alone responding to, and nobody posting to an Internet forum is going to hurt my feelings. Constructive criticism might be to re-read messages before posting them; simply pointing out spelling and grammar errors makes a person sound like a jerk who is interested in form over content. Are you trying to debate ideas and logic, or spell check a third grade writing essay?

Because you have already conceded that death is an appropriate punishment in the case of evil...

Interesting choice of words....I am not sure that I would say that death is an appropriate punishment. I would say that it is an excellent way to protect society from re-offence. But, really, is is an appropriate punishment? I think we both agree that life in prison is definitely crueler, if death is simply oblivion, and not some sort of a delusional gateway to a religious afterlife of just punishment. An appropriate punishment might be being forced to get to know their victim intimately, and come to know and understand the person that they killed and the loss they inflicted on society as a result. Barring some sort alien technology that forces empathy on a killer, I am content with flawless conviction proceedings and a bullet in the head. Until then, no death penalty, a wrongful death, wither perpetrated by a insane sociopath or a lawful society, is still a wrongful death.

I'm not against all of the additional costs, mind you, in this day and age we ought to be damn sure we're executing the right person.

well spoken. In fact you touched on another reason to do away with the death penalty: Suppose you convict and execute the wrong guy. You have just committed a double error in that an innocent is dead, and the real criminal will likely never be found and caught. Has there ever been a case where the wrong person has been executed, and then the real criminal is caught and successfully prosecuted? IANAL, but I don't think I have ever heard of such a thing....

super-rich liberals to hurl their money at the cases...

Your word betray your loyalties sir. Shouldn't you be off angrily watching Bill O' Riley? Or perhaps masturbating to Ann Coulter taking about shooting 'gay liberal Jewish media types'?

Lets ignore the very warped worldview you seem to have, and just look at the 'super-liberal' comment: Where do you think that the vast majority of the money the defense spends comes from? Do you think that there are wealthy, left leaning millionaires swooping in to donate vast sums of money to accused murderers in order to get them acquitted? If only they would butt out, the prosecution could have this killer convicted by noon, and the bailiff could shoot them behind the courthouse before lunch. Your vast ignorance of, well, everything is strangely enthralling....

you're assuming capital punishment is murder in order to prove it's wrong.

Maybe that's inferring too much, and you meant "murder" to apply only to the execution of the innocent, but even there, murder hardly seems the right term.

From the point of view of the innocent victim, it pretty much is murder. The legal basis for sentencing someone to death is their guilt.

It's a pity you can't grasp that someone may disagree with you and still be honest.

You are changing what I said from what was essentially, 'all rational people value their lives', to 'people who disagree with me are dishonest'. My claim was that someone who says they don't value their own life is being dishonest to you or themselves.

Further, the point of the test was humanize the faceless 'innocent victim'. Its easy to abstractly say, 'fuck em, the can just die. I am smart enough to stay out of situations that can get me falsely charged with murder', because the person is an abstract name in a new article. its a lot harder to consign someone you care about to unjustly die because we are human and hasty in our decisions.

Feet first, the person will just pass out pretty quickly from shock and blood loss. Head first == truly gruesome screams as their head is crushed to splinters. They will experience everything until the end.

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.