"No, he's saying that if the officer was in fact following procedure (questionable) then he should be shielded from liability."

Right. And then I said he should be held liable just as much as if pointing a gun at an unarmed man was not illegal or against procedure and he did it then the gun went off.

" Even in post-war Germany, rank and file soldiers weren't prosecuted for their crimes against humanity."

Godwinism doesn't help your case.

" If the guy was in fact doing his duty ..."

Which he wasn't, unless you are saying that he protected and served the bicyclist. If so, you have a funny definition of protecting and serving.

" Not every bad thing that happens needs to have someone punished for it."

A bad thing didn't "happen". That implies lack of causaility and responsibility. A cop favored efficency in the field and a chance at promotion over the safety and well being of the citizenry. Excusing the behavior is dangerous. Almost as dangerous as putting guns in the hands of people who don't have the common sense to not use a computer while driving.

"This was within standard operating procedure for the deputy."

So what you are saying is there are at least two people who should go to jail for manslaughter. The person or people who said to do this, and the officer who was negligent enough to follow the procedure.

"There seems to be this attitude out there that pot is harmless, and that's just not the case in my experience. In moderation, it's probably safe. But chronic use- long term use at high doses- seems to really fuck people up."

There seems to be this attitude out there that oxygen is harmless, and that's just not the case in my experience. In moderation, it's probably safe. But chronic use- long term use at high doses- seems to really fuck people up."

"The War on Drugs has been a a smashing success - it's put millions of people whom the power structure wanted to imprison in prison, diverted billions of dollars to those in the power structure, and helped subsidize honest-to-God warfare in South America and Mexico- and still, too small of a subset of Americans realize this."

Just a little accuracy upgrade to your well thought out post.

"I doubt the war on drugs was only targeted towards Marijuana."

Since people aren't Marijuana you would be right. The War on Drugs is a misnomer. It has always been a losing war against the US Citizens, and more specifically a subset of the US citezenry that valued morals and freedom of choice over laws designed to create a ruling class and a subjegated class. This is not to say that there are no immoral drug users of course, but the all too often successful attempt to paint drug use as immoral was never about helping people, and has always been about excercising control over them. In truth: Drugs have done some good things for US.

""CISC functionality" is the ability to execute a given CISC instruction set with acceptable performance."

When you start off with a broken definition, everything you say about it becomes suspect.

"you can choose to use fewer transistors in one place on a chip in favor of more transistors in another place,"

That's a phenomenally stupid thing to say, and represents a complete lack of understanding of circuit design in general.

"You may happen to execute some functions slower, and other functions faster, but if the net result is faster execution of the code actually run on the machine, you have a better implementation."

This statement represents a complete lack of understanding of benchmarking.

"For existing architectures, the reason they don't do it is that it would require changes to the instruction format, which, for most instruction set architectures, would be a royal pain."

Again, that is just phenomenally stupid, and alludes to the idea that the designers are lazy, as well as ignoring the fact the nothing about chip design is anything other than "a royal pain."

" For ARM, they were already introducing a 64-bit variant of the instruction set, and didn't have to maintain binary compatibility."

Do you even think about what you write before you write it?

Just accept that your attempts to sound like you have a clue failed miserably, and you have been called on it. You haven't made a coherent point in the entire post, and you need to let qualified designers make decisions rather than playing "armchair designer."

"I said nothing about keeping all the same functionality, if by "functionality" you mean"

The problem is that you were assuming you are the only one speaking in this thread. The discussion was about adding more registers in a CISC architecture, and so CISC functionality is the context. When you ask what "the same functionality means" that is absurd. You can't implement a subset of the functionality and still have the same functionality.

I'll put this in simpler terms. Smart people design CPUs and they don't add a bunch of registers even though that would be useful. The reason they don't do it is because of the additional chip real estate it would cost in an already over-taxed landscape, not because they are lazy or haven't though of the idea.