To be fair, based on the number of Finnish F1 and WDC champions, they're pretty fucking good at it :P

Except, if you read even the summary, you'll discover that they're taking half of estimated spending money, not half of your income. Someone living paycheck to paycheck would get an extremely small fine, while someone earning millions will be deprived of nearly half their income.

Of course not - that's trivially provable by the fact that for a list of length n, n pointers must be rewritten.

You think people don't fight tooth and nail to get out of being in prison for their entire life?

The point of the bank of switches would be to cause reasonable doubt about which of the people did it. Your single switch would leave one person who's action (not inaction) caused a death.

That said, the rest of the comments in this thread are right, the correct way to execute someone in the 21st century is to not execute people in the 21st century.

Well, it's more expensive to execute people than to keep them in prison for life, so... Quite easily I'd imagine.

Yep, came here to say this. The solution is to realise that we're in the 21st century, and we no longer need any of this "eye for an eye" nonsense.

It's more expensive than life imprisonment, it's more likely to have catastrophic consequences if a miscarriage of justice occurs, and it's less of a punishment.

Right, it's not an interesting technical problem to render a scene with lots of interesting lighting effects. No one would ever want to read about that, because game play is more important.

"Most give less money than the competitors"...

You're asserting that the median wage is higher than the median wage. Your logic doesn't work very well.

That's a very strange assertion. It's kinda akin to "if there's half a million jobs out there, why are there people who don't have jobs". The answer is trivial - those people don't have the skills necessary to do those jobs. I can tell you for sure, hiring people who (for example) understand performance critical code, code that requires manual memory management, and code that requires you to think about how you're going to affect cache coherency when you do certain things, is incredibly hard. Add a couple of odd constraints like "has an understanding of linear algebra" or "knows how a compiler works", and you're likely to have extreme trouble finding anyone at all for the position.

You realise that when you take a flash photo, the flash should not be pointing at the subject in all but the rarest cases, right?

There's only one type of flash photography that needs the flash to point forwards - that's front filling (where you use the flash to try to even out dim lighting close to the camera, and bright lighting in the distance, and which is typically used for landscape photos)

For pretty much all other cases, instead, you want to bounce the flash off a large surface, to diffuse the light. Otherwise, all you get is photos with a big white specular dot right in the centre.

This is why when you look at a professional flash, you'll note that it tilts in all axes, rather than simply pointing forwards, like the crappy flashes they put on consumer cameras to try and even out their poor ISO response.

The problem with "prison is a punishment" is that it's a really crappy punishment. What society gets out of punishing someone with prison is a person who's become educated in the ways of criminals. That's not a valuable thing. Because of that, use of prison as a punishment should be avoided, and instead, other punishments (like community service) should be used. Then society gets something valuable from the person being punished, they potentially get educated in a task that they weren't before, and is useful to society, and we all win.

As I asserted before, prison should be reserved only for separating people from society when they are dangerous.

Okay, so there's a difference in scale. That only means that there's a difference in scale of how much you limit it.

That doesn't mean that the concept is fundamentally flawed.

Note - don't actually try the breathing thing, it'll cause you to gain weight (breathing out is the only significant way your body expels mass - all that fat is turned into the carbon in the CO2 you breath out)

Even then, that's ludicrous. Prison should be used as a way of removing a dangerous person from society until they're no longer a danger. Even people who sell millions of pirated copies are not dangerous. Sure, they should face stiff financial penalties, and/or be made to repay society in some other way (community service etc), but prison is not the right place for them.

It sounds very similar to me. You're suggesting people limit their need for carbon (which their body will burn and form CO2 with), he's suggesting that they limit their need for oxygen (which their body will use to burn carbon and form CO2 with). I'm not sure how much more similar you can get.