So, given the history of every single religion, you basically state outright that no faith is worth anything.

There is not a single semi-organized religion or faith, that did not at one point or another declare people with doubts (or simply people who were in the way, politically, militarily or socially) as heretics of one form or another. The Catholics had the Jews, Albigensian, Protestants, Orthodox, Muslims, African/American natives etc. pp. Those each in turn had others they at some point persecuted with the rhetorical help from the followers of their faith. Even the Shintoists and Buddhists kept up a nice war against each other regularly in the history of the Asian continent. Even the religions of pre-colonial South-America used faith as a leverage to incite their own people against others or themselves.

And if you say: But these were only the people, not the faith itself. Well, that's begging the question as the faith itself does nothing at all. A faith followed by no people is just as active as a faith followed by half the world. It's not the faith that does things, it's the people adhering to the faith. And if they misbehave, then yes, the faith itself is probably being misused, but that is entirely inconsequential to those affected by the cruelty of its followers.

A faith is nothing more than an abstract idea, powerless and meaningless without followers. Just like the idea of the atomic bomb is powerless without building the bomb itself. Just like the bomb acquires meaning through its use (or not-use), the consequences and meaning of a faith is entirely and completely dominated by the people following it. So if the people are bad, then yes, the faith is bad; not by itself but by its results.

Given this and your own statement, yes, indeed all faiths are literally worth nothing. Just like any other idea. As you correctly pointed out: People are not automatons. So accept that some people do indeed realize this fundamental truth about the concept of ideas and the consequence that you need to judge people by their actions, not their faith or ideas -- and that you should be extremely wary of judging unduly.

I think you'd have fit in great as an ancient greek philosopher. After all, according to no one less than Aristotle:

"In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead."
and
"If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless."

This is the same flawed logic you are using. The fast runner DOES overtake the slow runner eventually, because even though you can split their progress into infinitely small amounts of space, you also split the time needed to cross that distance. As such, at some finite point in time, the distance between the two runners will be 0 and then grow in favour of the faster runner. It does not matter that you can theoretically split space infinitely often, as you must also always split time in the same manner.

And equally, the arrow moves eventually to its target, because even though you can split time into theoretically arbitrarily small chunks and thus eventually reduce the speed of the arrow per infinitely small time slice to 0, you split the space covered in the slice just as much. As such, you will reach any finite point in space (assuming the arrow is not stopped by something) in finite time. Again it does not matter than you can theoretically split time, because you need to split space at the same time.

So the same applies in your example. Yes, you can theoretically increase the number of times you split the saved power infinitely often, but to do so, you also have to increase the number of users infinitely often. As such, you will by summing it all up arrive at a non-zero amount of power saved in total. As you know from the laws of thermodynamics, you can't destroy energy. So the saved energy must be stored in some form or another. You can "waste" it by turning it into excess heat, or you can store it for later in a more accessible form, or not liberate it to begin with from its initial high-potential state (as coal, nuclear fuel, wind, water, etc.).

Simply put: Knowledge about the principles of infinities and successive splits has increased dramatically since ancient Greece.

As far as I can remember, you're still entering your PIN with your fingers, aren't you? And everybody's using the same keypad, too. Not to mention the usual places people use as arm-rests on those machines while they wait for their card/money.

In other words: You touch stuff that was touched by other beings all the time. Our evolution was constrained by that. As such, most living things on this planet -- including you -- has a neat facility that is called "immune system". It also works almost all the time, as far as I've heard.

Ahh, so I figure you finally want to see that overhyped second frame.

Let me tell you, after you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all. ;-)

But, and get this, only if it violates other parts of the constitution.

As far as I understand it -- and I am neither a lawyer nor a US-American -- amendments to the US constitution can only be made ineffective by the Supreme Court declaring them unconstitutional (i.e. it violating either a prior or a later, other amendment), but only repealed by the legislative branch (Senate/House of Repr.) by introducing a new amendment; which has happened with the 18th amendment (prohibition) that was repealed by the 21st after the Supreme Court ruled it violated the 4th and 5th amendment.

To put it in CompSci terms: The judicative (courts) only did a sanity check on the input, whereas the legislative (parliament) took measures to actually clean up the input. So the former only prevented bad input from producing bad output, which caused the former to make sure that that brand of bad input is not possible at all anymore.

You could say that in these cases, the courts can only negate or affirm, but not ask a new question. They might state their opinion that a new question should be asked, but can't ask it themselves.

Thought about it, but then the stickler in me pointed out that using the surname of one and the first name of another somehow feels ... off.

And I guess I wouldn't be a true Slashdotter if I let unimportant things like rhyme and beauty override my (of course flawless) sense of reason. ;-)

A very subtle and easy alteration is all that is needed to make that joke fit that much better:

[chant and response]
"What are we going to do today, Sergey?"
"Same thing we do every day, Larry. Try to take over the world!"

[music]
They're Page-y and the Brin.
Yes, Page-y and the Brin!
One is a genius,
The other is insane!
They're laboratory mice.
Their genes have been spliced!
They're dinky, they're Page-y and the Brin, Brin, Brin, Brin,
Brin, Brin, Brin, Brin,
Brin.

Before each night is done
Their plan will be unfurled.
By the dawning of the sun
They'll take over the world.

They're Page-y and The Brin.
Yes, Page-y and The Brin
Their twilight campaign
Is easy to explain.

To prove their mousy worth,
They'll overthrow the Earth.
They're dinky, they're Page-y and The Brin, Brin, Brin, Brin
Brin, Brin, Brin, Brin

Narf!

Minor correction due to it being far too late over here for perfectly clear thinking:

NP-complete is actually a problem that solves all NP-problems (including NP-hard) and can be shown to be itself in NP. NP-hard removes the latter restriction, as any machine that can solve problems "harder than NP-complete" can trivially solve all NP-problems. So NP-hard encompasses more problems and is thus the broader category of problems. Please keep that in mind when reading my above posting, as its points are still correct, but showing P = NP-hard is much, much, much more difficult than showing P = NP-complete.

Of course, any single NP-hard problem might actually be "merely" an NP-complete one, in case we have just not yet found an algo that can execute it in NP-time.

Attention: Car analogy in the last paragraph! Skip ahead, if you are bored.

If you can prove NP != P, then yes. In that case, you can not solve an NP-hard problem in polynomial time on a deterministic Turing machine. You can still solve it on a non-deterministic Turing machine in polynomial time though. And on an Oracle-NP machine, you can even solve it in one step; as those machines have an "Oracle" that can tell you the solution of an arbitrary problem in NP in one step.

There's a enormous zoo of complexities to sort problems into, from LOGSPACE, PSPACE, P, NP, PSPACE, NPSPACE, EXPSPACE, EXP, Oracle(P) all the way up to problems that are provably non-computable, like the Halting Problem.

But get this: All these categories have in effect a specific machine associated with them. For example PSPACE problems are those, that can be solved on a machine that needs a polynomial amount of memory based on the input size to solve a problem. LOGSPACE is the same, but with logarithmic space. CSPACE is the same with a constant amount of space.

Then you get to P, which does not care for space (indeed, the memory of the machine is assumed to be infinite), but it can only deterministically execute its program. If reading the symbol A in state B, it can only execute the action C -- and no other. If that machine can solve your problem in polynomial time (that is, polynomially many executions of operations with constant cost), then the problem is in P.

NP is the same, but now your machine may execute either action C or D when in State B and reading symbol A, depending on a certain random variable (i.e. a coin-flip). If it does not need more than polynomially many of those "random" steps, then your problem is in NP.

And now here's the nice thing: Every problem in P is also in NP. Why? Easy, because a non-deterministic machine can emulate a deterministic one; therefore, an NP-machine can trivially solve the problems a P-machine can by just following the same recipe (or emulating the P-machine).

But here's the difficult thing: Is it possible to create a P-machine that can emulate an NP-machine while still needing only a polynomial number of steps for each step of the NP-machine. After all, remember than n^c * n^d = n^(c+d). If both c and d is constant; (c+d) is constant and this n^(c+d) is still polynomial in respect to n.

The problem is, this reverse-question is damn hard to prove. But what you can prove is, is that there are certain problems whose solution on an NP-machine has a strange property: If you find a machine that can solve this problem on polynomial time, it can solve ALL OTHER NP-problems also in polynomial time; just by first rephrasing the desired problem to the problem it can actually solve. These problems are called NP-hard, because they are at least as hard as every other NP-problem. NP-complete problems are those whose results can be shown to be verifiable in P-time.

Thus, if you solve any NP-hard problem on a P-machine, you have shown that all NP-problems are solvable with that machine. If you can only show that the solved problem is in NP (but not -hard), then all you've shown is that the problem is a P-problem instead.

As always, if you want to known more, ask Wikipedia.

If you want a car-comparison, though, maybe that will do: There are cars and airplanes. Airplanes can provably fly, drive around and transport cars; we think that cars can only drive around and transport other cars (and some small airplanes). If you can show that you can make a flying car, that can transport any airplane, you have shown that airplanes are not more than just strange looking versions of cars.

Most of your points where direct contact are concerned are true. If your ship gets hit, you'll hear and feel something, depending on where the ship is hit and what kind of secondary damage is caused.

But the point about the sphere of compressed gas is lunacy. At the distances involved in any sensible combat, anything short of nuclear blasts will not yield you more than a light breeze of compressed gas, due to the fact that the density of the gas decreases exponentially with the distance travelled. And exponential decrease will make any bug number very small, very fast.

You also need to take into consideration, that there is only negligible transmission of compression in space. The gas you compressed through the initial explosion is not able to transmit its energy directly from molecule to molecule. Instead, the particles need to move directly from the source to you. It's the difference between exploding a shell underwater; where you can hear and feel a small explosion even when it happens hundreds of meters (in case of hearing kilometers) away, and trying the same in plain air. Since there are less molecules to transmit the compression to, and they need to travel further until they smash into the next molecule to transmit their energy towards you, the transmission is vastly more inefficient and as such of more limited range and impact.

Finally, in space you can only compress what is actually there. So instead of compressing a spherical shell of thousands of tons of water and transmitting the energy directly from molecule to molecule, you can only compress a few kilograms of rarefied gas, plus the gas from the original explosion (which can't weigh more than your bomb itself) and have to actually get most of the original molecules from the point of explosion to the point of impact. Since the speed of the molecules is constant; as the speed of your explosion is, it's the difference between being hit by large train travelling 60km/h and being hit by a ping-poll ball travelling 60km/h. One will turn you into mush, the other will make you want to turn the other guy into mush.

Summarized: same energy of explosion + less gas to compress + less efficient compression + larger distances ~= a drop of water on the Mount Everest. Sure, given enough time and repetition you might eventually erode the mountain away, but chances are that the stuff that is inside the water will actually deposit more matter than it erodes.

Jonking aside, I do think that there's a tiny difference between going to a 2-3 hour long football game session while drinking copious amounts of beer and returning to a well heated home, and trying to survive in Stalin^H^H^H^H^H^HVolgograd for 2-3 months while mostly subsisting on dirt and untreated water. While the enemy occasionally shoots at you. And you get bombarded quite a lot. And the last open fire you've seen was the one half your platoon was burnt to ashes in.

Yep, both are real fun times. :)

Sorry, I mangled the formatting a bit in the previous posting without noting it.

Everything after the "(It should be noted" line is my answer up until the last properly quoted part.

One of these days, Slashdot should allow you to edit your posting again for a short while after you've hit submit. :)

That's why I specifically stated: [...] But the death penalty -- at least in its incarnation where you don't just shoot/hang/burn the first person you think is guilty ---[...].

Just like in physics (or anything, really), the practicality of something depends on its entire cost and not just its cost in part of the system.

I never said that the lock-away-and-forget approach is completely practical either. Most capital offenses occur on the spur of the moment -- even some cases of rape. For most people thus jailed, there is not a particularly high chance of them doing it again, if the situation in the prison is not living hell.

If it is, then you have a wholly different slew of problems. Someone greater than me (Dostojevski) once said, that "“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons". He was right, you know. As such, it does not help the argument for the death penalty to point out that you can make prison itself a place worse than death.

Of course, there are people usually falling into the blurry category of "criminally insane". These of course need a different treatment, but "off-with-their-head" is a highly unilluminating one. Instead, it is far more helpful to try to understand what made them do what they did and what causes them to do it again and again. As horrible as their crimes are, learning what caused them is a far more useful approach for society. You know, maybe you will find a cure and prevent future murders, either by treating the condition or at least recognizing it earlier from small warning signs. If you ask me, that sounds much more practical.

Of course, that too ultimately enters territories that go beyond mere practicality. Crime and Punishment is simply a far too encompassing problem to be treated with just one approach to analysis and judgement -- which was the entire point of my initial posting.

Thanks, you've just vindicated my first point. As I said, practicality does undeniably enter into the pro-life/pro-choice debate. If, without abortion, death for both is certain; pure practicality demands to save the mother's life. If the mother's death is certain (for example in the most extreme case of her being already brain-dead), practicality demands to save the child, even if this will kill the mother.

But of course, as your point also shows, the very last sentence of my posting is also true: Even in questions where practicality is a useful criterion, others -- like morality -- have to be considered to cover the myriad of cases where pure practicality fails or gives an inconclusive or incomplete answer.

And in some cases -- like the death/life penalty debate -- I personally see all situations as being either uncovered by pure practicality or very slightly in favour of life-penalty.

That's probably raising lots of flames and will burn some karma, but I find it difficult to see practicality in the death penalty. Abortion now, at least indeed has undeniable practicality in some cases, like where the birth would simply kill the mother. It's hard to argue against that point.

But the death penalty -- at least in its incarnation where you don't just shoot/hang/burn the first person you think is guilty -- seems awfully impractical. Compared to life imprisonment it costs the same (or sometimes even more) and has the same outcome of preventing recidivism (re-offending). But, unfortunately it does cause psychological strain on those having to dish out the penalty (that life imprisonment certainly doesn't) and prevents any sort of future moral insight in the guilty, no matter how unlikely you deem it.

A further difference is what some victims feel, namely the warm gut feeling of satisfied murderous revenge ... which is most likely what the person who got the penalty also got at some point and is even maybe what they might have gotten the penalty for to begin with. But since the logical outcome of life and death penalty is ultimately the same anyway (death); only one with more delay than the other, you can't really say that the latter is more practical in that regard either. In both cases, they will never see freedom again or get a chance to repeat their action until they die (and if you're not religious and there's no after-life, this lack is permanent).

As such, I see no reason how practicality could decide the question of the use of the death penalty, as it seems to me just as practical (or even a smidgeon less practical, I admit) than real life imprisonment.

Of course, practicality and morality are two different things that need to be evaluated differently, and thus -- at least for me -- the question is a moral, and not a practical one.