You open an interesting philosophical point: where the state fails to execute a murderer, a man may forfeit his life to state execution by carrying justice by his own hand. On principle in the ideal case, I don't have a problem with this; we all know Samuel L. Jackson doesn't.

There are major cultural differences in the US versus the UK which largely drive the differences in the form and method of crime. Burglars in the US seem to not want to be seen; that's a gross simplification.

If I can't fight them, they'll take my gun away.

If you want to take someone in a ground fight, bring them to it: you can tangle them while falling to the ground, quickly gaining absolute advantage.

Standing fights look more awesome than ground fights. Standing, it is possible to immediately react to an opening, and so landing a strike typically provides a new opening which you are fully capable of landing another strike in. Putting aside practically useless 30-step kata, the real world gives you plenty of opportunity to chain attacks; these opportunities do not come when grounded.

Once the fight is on the ground, you're both facing a situation of vying for balance and control. Usually gaining balance loses control: The opponent who forces me to my back gets his face punched clear off his head. Gaining control often loses balance: the opponent who manages to guard my limbs cannot prevent me from shifting and coming at him on angle to unseat him. The fight ends in the same way as a standing fight: by damage beyond ability to fight at your opponent's level or by complete and total forced submission. Submission is hard in a ground fight, therefor you're looking to deal as much damage as possible or to escape and get back to standing; my preference is to have my opponent standing, as I don't find advantage in standing over an opponent lunging from the ground (I mean, I can kick... and be on one leg, impressing myself with my elite ability to balance while imagining groin strikes don't exist).

Standing or on the ground, you have two weapons: awareness and reflex. All else is incidental.

It's been shown that a criminal with a knife can cross 25 feet and kill a cop in 1.3 seconds. That's a sprint of 12mph; a normal human can break 25mph for a second or two, and Usain Bolt can do it for about 8 seconds.

If a gun's pointed at me, there is a problem. If I see you reaching for a gun, that's a wholly different scenario. These two things require differentiation.

To be fair, a firearm probably is the best home defense weapon on hand; it's just that a home invasion is rare.

What gets me is people who think the gun makes them a god. I will never carry a weapon when I'm out. What if I get jumped? What if a mugger pulls a gun on me? People tell me, "Oh, I'll shoot them." "When a mugger threatens me with his gun, I'll shoot him with my gun." You're grappling on the ground, you reach to pull out a gun... and you don't think you're now grappling for a firearm? The mugger will see you reach for a firearm and shoot you dead with the one already trained on your face.

I'm not bringing a liability to a fight. For a firearm to do me any good, I need to be able to take you with my bare hands first so I can get to the damn thing without having it taken from me. If I can do that, I'll just beat the shit out of you in the first place, and if you bring out your own firearm I'll take that and shoot you with it. If it's not a war, a stealth infiltration, a closed-quarter invasion, or a defense against animals (bear), carrying a firearm is the absolute stupidest thing I can do.

As opposed to ruining the trust of people for the law to protect them? Have you noticed that the police and the courts are the enemies of innocent men? Does it not offend you that the sight of police makes you feel paranoid rather than protected?

Which logical fallacy was it where you stand up a situation and then silently remove a piece of that situation? You've claimed "appropriate situations", and then removed the concept.

It *is* appropriate to kill in self-defense where other alternatives are significantly less profitable. If you have a 90% likelihood of death in self-defense by non-lethal means and a 90% likelihood of survival by applying lethal self-defense, it is more profitable to apply lethal self-defense. You are not morally obligated to take a severe risk of death to avoid harming a man who is trying to kill you and has damn good chance of succeeding.

Dividends are created in stocks, yes. They don't get paid in from company bank accounts which are credited the total dividend debited into the market; the money simply appears out of the ether.

In two weeks, they can decide if they need to stay execution longer.

People like to absolve themselves for what they do not do. How is putting a man in jail for 20 years not killing him? When he comes out, he is a ruined man. He may be a hardened criminal, and may then commit violent crimes again--not because it's his nature, but because he has had 20 years in prison to be forged into a man who has much lower inhibitions for murder. Now his crimes are on your head, and the blood of the innocents who die are on your hands.

Punishment as a deterrent is a complex topic. In cases where executions are not deterrent, we inevitably execute 1 innocent man for 0 innocent lives saved, a ratio of 1/0 or infinite failure. In cases where executions are deterrent, we have a 1/X ratio; if X is positive, we are successfully saving lives overall. We want two things: the fewest innocent people executed per guilty executed (a fraction, i.e. 1 per 99 or 1/99), and the most innocent lives saved by deterrent (also a ratio, i.e. 1 innocent lost per 10 saved or 1/10).

Even if we execute 1 innocent per 10,000 murderers, if we save no innocents by deterrent then we are failing. If we execute 1 innocent per 1 murderer, but save 10 innocents by deterrent for every 1 executed, there will be 10 times as much blood on our hands if we stop; this system is as acceptable as the former and, be it 1/1 or 1/10000, we should strive to reduce the number of innocents lost by incorrect judgment. Although we should target our efforts at the worst ones, we can never consider a system where one innocent is lost as more acceptable; it simply has less need.

"Cruel and unusual punishment" is interpreted by the observer.

We should bring back medieval punishment. We should quarter people we execute: tie a rope to their head and body, ensure the head severs first--and have a bolt smash the back of the skull besides--such that the transition to death is not noticed. We should flog and cane people for minor offenses. We should do so publicly, on occasion, but on so little occasion so as to not desensitize the crowd to it.

A brutal, gruesome execution may be swift and painless yet incredibly upsetting to the observer. This is good. The observer should hold the resolve that what is done need doing. He should face the consequences of what need doing, so that his senses sicken him and so that he will have no eagerness to have such a thing done. A peaceful execution does not disturb the observer, and he readily accepts the causality of trail and execution; a brutal, disturbing execution forces the observer to grasp for justice, to demand that execution follow *crime*, to question the competence of trial and demand certainty about that which we do.

We have likewise grown too accustomed to the ideal imprisonment, a peaceful alternative to medieval torture. We have forgotten the true nature of torture, the crushing psychological force of long, unending terror for the coming, unending pain. Floggings are swift; the agony does not go on for hours or days on end, although the pain lingers. Prison destroys a man; a petty thief does not deserve weeks or months rotting while his finances dwindle, while his relationships fall apart, while his home is reclaimed by his landlord for lack of payment. Doubtless we wrongly absolve ourselves of this ideal of murder by placing an innocent man in prison, claiming that we can release him in ten or fifteen years if he proves innocent; doubtless we release nothing more than a walking corpse.

We have become a despicable people who claim ourselves civilized because we have painted over all of the offensive things we do in bright pastels.

Writing passwords down is not a security problem.

Say it with me: Writing passwords down is not a security problem.

Writing passwords down in a place where they can be obtained within the bounds of your threat model is a security problem. My passwords are written in invisible ink in a book kept inside a locked filing cabinet at my desk; likewise, I have a password safe that double-encrypts with a long password (all lower case and spaces) as a symmetric key for the real key used in two passes of AES+Blowfish. If someone is in here looking through my cabinet with the foresight to bring a UV flashlight, locate my password book, shine the light on it, and interpret the passwords (i.e. know what to use them for), we have other problems.

Now if I were to take the book from the office and lose it somewhere, that's different. In fact, the book should not leave the office. Any password list which travels should contain only passwords; it should not contain an explanation that they are passwords, or what system they're for, or to what entity they belong. Depending on security needs, it may be inappropriate to ever move a password list.

I'm quite used to a threat model where losing my card results in compromise. I know how to handle that. Having the PIN written on the card is the same threat model; it's acceptable to me.

In this case, it's more like someone asked for a flower bed and you gave them sculpted topiary. Everything is cut to precise structure, rather than natural and fluid. Jar-Jar stands out because he is natural and fluid; the cast doesn't react to him well at all; but they react just as flatly to everything else, so their poor acting appears good and Jar-Jar's more dynamic character appears disruptive.

He stands out too much. I don't think the character's actually bad, just that modern cinematic performance cannot keep up. Like wearing a $400 blazer over some clothes from The Gap.

As I said above: This is an extreme minority case. It would be as if you prepared your house with steel doors and barred windows and turrets and artillery so as to prepare for invasion by an armed mob of rioters. It happens once in a while, every several decades; but now it is inconvenient to get into your house, and your house is expensive and needs much maintenance. This is not worth doing.

It's not possible in the model I described. You can't copy the card. The card has a data channel which you send input and it returns output; the contents of the card cannot be cloned except by physically prying off the chip, using acid to dissolve the case, and then using a scanning electron microscope to examine the integrated circuitry. At this point, you don't have the card in your wallet.

My point was that inaction is not moral absolution.

Punishments act as a deterrent when the punishment is effective--that is, when the punishment is both the most likely thing to occur as a consequence *and* when the punishment is perceived as severe.

For example: in peaceful, low-crime suburbs where the population is not acclimated to violence, a violent crime is unlikely to end in justifiable homicide (self defense by killing), and so whatever the state hands out as sentence is the most likely consequence. Conversely, in violent ghettos plagued by gang turf wars, the most common practical consequence of violent crime is hazard: gang criminals are killed more often in gang wars than they're arrested. The difference between a fine, jail time, and execution in the first group is what actually happens as consequence; in the second group, it's just a bunch of bullshit they don't have time to worry about because they're more concerned with the immediate risk of death than some abstract idea of state execution..

Likewise, in rich towns, fines are bullshit; in poor towns, people can be crippled and destroyed by a $40 parking ticket. The same punishment is more or less effective depending on the culture. Community service works well where people are generally law-abiding and afraid of the legal process itself; imprisonment and executions--both exceedingly harmful--are necessary when dealing with people who have no appreciation for the law. Executions are appropriate where capital criminals do not fear long imprisonment.

We posit two situations from the above: the situation where execution is not a deterrent; and the situation in which it is.

In the situation where execution is not a deterrent, executions do not save lives. Executing an innocent man is a loss of innocent life, which is harmful and to be avoided. We are morally obligated to this.

In the situation where execution is a deterrent, executions save lives. The effectiveness of executions has two parameters: Ratio of criminals to innocents and ratio of innocents executed to innocents saved. A good system may execute 99 criminals and 1 innocent while deterring enough murder as to save the lives of 10 innocents for every 1 innocent executed. A poor system may execute 1 criminal per 1 innocent, or save 2 innocents per 1 executed.

In either case where execution is a deterrent, withdrawing execution means more innocent people die in violent crime. Where it is not a deterrent, the error factor is infinite: any 1 innocent executed has a share in 0 lives saved, 1/0 is infinite, and we cannot justify this. Thus, where it is a deterrent, we are morally obligated to have state executions; where it is not a deterrent, we are morally obligated to not have state executions.

This does not go away when execution is not a deterrent. Imprisonment is harmful: a man imprisoned during a critical part of his life will lose or never develop his family and career, while becoming distant with his friends and financially ruined. We thus face the same: rather than executed versus save, the numbers are imprisoned versus saved: a poor system may imprison as many innocent people as criminals!

We cannot solve this by eliminating state execution. We must instead improve our system, both in swiftness and in accuracy. Some believe we execute 1 innocent man for every 24 violent criminals; this should become 1 innocent man for every 99 violent criminals, and then even higher. We should likewise attempt to stay execution where we feel it not to be a deterrent, and carry it out where we feel it is; this will increase the overall effectiveness, saving more innocent lives per execution, of which inadvertently executed innocents have a share.

We can improve in this way by improving the stricture of evidence required for execution; but we would gain the most benefit from improving the system wholesale. Such improvement will reduce the number of innocents in prison as well as the number of innocents executed. Likewise, expedition will reduce the phenomena of innocent men sitting in jail for years at a time while facing trial, as with Casey Anthony who was sentenced to 3 years imprisonment and immediately released as she had served 4 during trial despite not having yet been found guilty of anything and with no restitution for that last year.

These are our moral obligations. We are obligate to provide for the security of society, not for our personal comfort in what our actions mean. The man who allows the destruction of innocent life to protect his sense of high morals has blood on his hands.

It's political when you're "going to do it" for years and then, the moment you can lord it over someone you don't like and show off how great you are, you finally pull the trigger and shout out to everyone how great you are.

Politics, like Go, is not about the precise action; it's about the timing of that action.

It's a matter of timing. This has been in the pipeline for a while; it got pushed through with immediacy as a political move. Reread the whole statement: this has been a long time coming, but it only happens at a critical political moment. Like Congress sitting on an important bill to provide mental healthcare and treatment for pedophiles for 8 years until there's a high-profile child murder-rape by an individual who obviously caved under the stress of his urge, and then passing it in a powerful show of strong, effective leadership.