I'm proposing that several indepent individuals separately perpetrated the crimes that were attribted to one single individual rather than to one individual and a few copycats.

I was basing that on your statement that it is assumed that Jack the Ripper was an individual person. If you include the eighteen alleged victims, then it's false that it is assumed Jack the Ripper was a solitary individual. For example, Emma Elizabeth Smith is one of the eighteen and prior to her death she reported that she had been attacked by three or four men. On the other hand, if you include only Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, then one person was sufficient to account for all of the evidence generally available. Some evidence, such as the sighting I mentioned earlier, suggests that one person was necessary. Patterns in the evidence also suggest that it was the same person for those six murders (or five, if you wish to remain canonical).

~Loyal

So we clearly need the next one to be racial-ethnic-religious with all tangential conspiracy theories as a bonus. And lest we forget... Palestine, Gaza, West Bank, Israel.

Well, Jack the Ripper's ethnicity is relevant to the story. The sentiment at the time was that the Ripper's crime was so heinous that he must have been an immigrant since no British person would commit such heinous crimes. The Ripper's ethnicity would be relevant to that sentiment. Similarly for his religious affinity. There was some graffiti found near Eddowes's apron saying, "The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing." (Variant spellings are in the records.) Some people hold that the graffiti was not written by the Ripper. Some hold that it was, and expressed Jack's anti-Semitic beliefs. Some hold that the Ripper was Jewish and wrote the graffiti to throw off suspicion.

~Loyal

The provenance of the shawl is very questionable. If it is the shawl found near the body of a ripper victim, it may very well not have been hers.

I haven't seen anything definitive, but if it's the shawl I'm thinking of, then it's very likely that it did belong to Catherine Eddowes. If it is then it was cut from the victim during the murder.

The shawl is actually an apron-like affair that women of that era commonly wore. Eddowes's apron was cut from her during the murder, and likely used to carry and conceal some of her organs. It was found a couple of blocks away near the famous, "The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing" graffiti. (Variant spellings are extant in the records.) The cut on the found apron matches the cut on the remaining part of the apron on her body.

~Loyal

Possibly because he was seen with Catherine Eddows by Joseph Lawende, Joseph Hyam Levy and Harry Harris less than eleven minutes prior to the murder, among other reasons.

~Loyal

ABSTRACT

In this paper we we compare the number of legs on humans (homo sapiens) and cats (felis catus). We rely heavily on previous work done on employment classifications and average height done in 1998[1] and 2005[2]. None of the previous work in either employment or height recorded leg quantity, so it was not possible to draw any conclusions. In this study, we generated a matrix associating leg quantity, employment, and average height, and we used an ad hoc method devised by the authors to describe cause and effect. Finally, we threw out all of the results and destroyed the data because to make generalizations on an entire population based on averages would be wrong and racist.

~Loyal

Several years ago I was looking at a World Book Encyclopedia article (I know. Get off my lawn.) about color-blindness, and it had two photographs. One was captioned "what red-green color-blind people see," and the other "what normally-sighted people see." My first thought was, "how do they know that!" Upon reading the article, though, I found it was stated that they located some of the very few people who were color blind in only one eye.

~Loyal

Not even the media contacted me when I sent anonymous tips concerning Stingray capabilities, and I worked on the project.

How could the media have contacted you when you sent in the tip anonymously?

~Loyal

That's why my password is, "I agree to indemnify Loyal Opposition and hold him blameless."

~Loyal

I would be surprised if real traffic light controllers did not have such a safety module.

They do. I worked for a company in 2005 that designed and manufactured traffic light controllers. We bought a standard module from a different company that just watched for conflicting signals, and switched the intersection to all flashing red if it ever saw one. Of course, it was a micro-computer, not an Electrical Engineering class project, but it wasn't connected to the internet and it didn't have any wireless communications ability, so it couldn't be hacked by anything short of physical presence and hand tools.

~Loyal

She's a stinking hypocrite who thinks children are accessories to make statements with and the sooner the state takes them away so they can actually have a decent shot at a life with a job without fries the better.

Ew. What a sad little world you live in.

~Loyal

First, why does the US still allow a death penalty?

Well, our judgement is that it provides a number of advantages. One advantage is the it prevents the convicted from committing further crimes. It's safer for the other prisoners, and it's safer for the guards. Another advantage is that it prevents others from committing particularly heinous crimes. I realise that there's evidence that such is not the case, but the evidence is not unequivocal; a reasonable person may still come to that conclusion. A third advantage is that it prevents people from declaring vendetta and taking vengeance. A fourth advantage is that it provides closure for the families and friends of the victim. Families don't have to keep track of parole hearings, and spend time and money testifying against parole.

We tend to argue how much a prisoner costs society, but rarely discuss the morality of executing people.

I disagree. We tend to discuss the morality of executing people ad nauseam. If there's anything left un-discussed, I think it's the effect on the executioners. Knowing that you've killed a human being is going to do something undesirable to your psyche. I worry what it does to them later in life.

Next, and relates to the first is that the Prison systems in the US have become a for profit business.

I don't have a problem with that, but then I think of profit as the price we pay for efficiency. I understand that there's something dissonant about imprisoning people efficiently, but it does have the advantage over imprisoning them inefficiently. Maybe it would be better to think of it as imprisoning people expensively versus not imprisoning them expensively.

The privatization of prisons has caused countless issues. Such as contracts requiring a specific capacity at all times in prisons and the exploitation of prisoners. Laws have been passed to help keep prisons at capacity...

I'm not aware of those events, but I'll take your word for it. That being said, and I'm trying not to be flippant here, I can't see how the one relates to the other. I mean--if one executes a prisoner then the prisoner is not maintaining the capacity of the prison, is he? How do prison businesses exploit a corpse? And aren't laws being passed to keep prisons at capacity a problem with the legislature rather than one with the business?

...nearly everyone in the US can commit several felonies every day without their knowledge.

Now that is a problem I worry about. We imprison more people per capita than any other country. We're not a particularly lawless people, are we? Why do we put so many in prison? Something is wrong. Now, it could be said that we aren't lawless because we imprison so many, but I think that's just plain wrong. I particularly decry the increasing lack of a mens rea in recently passed laws. What's the point of that!

We could discuss other issues, such as how rehabilitation in the US really does not exist and society lacks opportunity for people motivating people to illegal activities but can save that for later.

Well...okay.

We should address why the US has the highest percentage of people in prison in the world,...

Amen, brother!

...and why we still have executions first.

Been there; done that; the T-shirt's stained with blood.

~Loyal

You wouldn't download a kidney, would you?

~Loyal

They can share some, all, or none of the sites. I really did a bad job explaining that.

If they shared some or all sites then they wouldn't be a separate 50 sites, no?

~Loyal

If strain A differs from strain B at 50 sites, and strain B from strain C at a separate 50 sites, A and C can have anywhere from 0-100 differences.

Oh, well. You're welcome. I'm still confused, though. If strain A differs from strain B at 50 sites, and strain B from strain C at a separate 50 sites, then isn't it true that A and C have exactly 100 differences?

~Loyal

it's still within the same order of magnitude.

You two are talking about different things. You're talking about certain types of intercourse given that exactly one subject is infected, and exactly one subject is uninfected. Anonymous Coward is talking about certain types of intercourse given that both subjects are members of the general population.

~Loyal