I'll provide an example I gave in another post. If the law prohibits minors gambling at the horse track, but Little Johnny stands right there listing off bets to an adult who parrots those bets to the track employee taking bets, then hands the money for those bets to the adult who hands it to the track employee, the law is clearly and obviously being circumvented and the entire intent of the law undermined by a simple loophole. (this actually works by the way, did it for years as a teen) Is this a capital crime that needs huge resources dumped into it? No, but ignoring it breeds disrespect for the law.

Perhaps another example. Let's assume there's a declaration requirement when entering the US which states that you have to declare when they're entering the US with cash in excess of $10,000 USD in value. Now let's say John Smith withdraws $50k from his bank, then flies to the US, where it's discovered that he, his wife, and each of his three young children each have $9,980 on their person. Then the law states that deposits in excess of $10,000 into US financial institutions must be reported, but John Smith fills out 5 separate deposit slips for $9,980 each. These are easy enough to cover in the legislation, you say. Sure, but there are 50 permutations of this you can come up with without getting creative. Then another 50 when you start thinking harder. Then another 100 when you involved a lawyer. And another 1,000 when you involve a creative lawyer. And in a week, you'll find another hundred ways to work around the letter of the law.

The point is that while I agree poorly written legislation is a problem and one that should be addressed, no legislation can ever be written in such a way that its intent cannot be undermined by a motivated individual with an agenda. If we begin with the idea that the intent of the law is valid, just, and good policy, we must endeavor to do all we can to keep obvious circumvention attempts at bay. The idea that one can easily violate the spirit of the law by "rules lawyering" the words and letters within it is just absurd. It's how you end up with ridiculous things like "it depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

Language is an imprecise means of conveying ideas. The intent of a law should be clearly defined and all attempts to violate that intent punishable in the same fashion. Anything less makes the whole thing a stupid game and the law ought to be above that.

And societies based on the rule of law only work when people largely understand the rules to be fair and applicable to all. The "some animals are more equal than others" crap doesn't fly for long in a mature modern democracy.

I think this is where we get into "clear and obvious". For example, if the law prohibits minors gambling at the horse track, but Little Johnny stands right there listing off bets to an adult who parrots those bets to the track employee taking bets, then hands the money for those bets to the adult who hands it to the track employee, the law is clearly and obviously being circumvented and the entire intent of the law undermined by a simple loophole. (this actually works by the way, did it for years as a teen) Is this a capital crime that needs huge resources dumped into it? No, but ignoring it breeds disrespect for the law.

I agree there are plenty of cases where this would not be a preferable addition to the law due to its potentially chilling effect on normal, legal activities. So in those cases, don't enact this kind of provision. In fact, you could even apply this just to laws that specifically govern the actions of government entities and employees in the commission of their official duties. The point is to ensure that legal games don't undermine the protections built into the law for all citizens. In fact, I think legislators should be one of the prime targets of this kind of legislation; when they pass laws that clearly and obviously violate the rights of citizens, they should face stiff legal penalties up to and including prison.

Gaming companies have dealt with issues like this for many years whereby players will attempt to engage in "rules lawyering" to get around the letter of the game's rules in order to exploit loopholes to essentially cheat to win. Game companies dealt with that by including a catch-all to simply say that if what you're doing is clearly and obviously designed to bypass the rules or exploit loopholes to gain an unfair or unintended advantage, you get punished.

Legislatures could learn a lesson from this. For each law written, write in a catch-all such that clear and obvious attempts to circumvent the law by exploiting loopholes in the wording brings about similar or the same penalties as violating the law itself. For laws designed to control groups, such as intelligence services, ensure that everyone involved bears the punishment of violating the law. In other words, get the guy who ordered it, the guy(s) who disseminated the orders, and everyone who carried out the orders. Then also include strong whistleblower protections and rewards for reporting the worst abuses. When everyone from the top of the organization to the bottom has their ass on the line and when enough carrots are dangled in front of the guys doing the grunt work, stuff like that will unravel in a hurry. I love my job for numerous reasons. Would I risk 20 years in prison for it if the higher-ups decided to start doing illegal stuff? Not a chance.

To be fair, South Africa is now the rape capital of the world.

Which is not to say that a system of racial oppression was to thank for keeping rape down, but rather to point out that strict policing can be associated with safer streets.

As some others have said in more colorful ways, being a good cop means doing everything you can under the law to get bad cops off the street. Bad cops doesn't just mean those taking bribes, planting evidence, etc. Bad cops includes police officers who unnecessarily approach situations with undue aggression and who unnecessarily escalate situations. I understand that much of an officer's interactions are either with people who aren't at their best or are with people who are just pain rotten to the core, but if that drives them into a pattern of cynicism and aggression not warranted by the situation, they can either self-report and get behind a desk and get counseling until their head gets back to a better place or they're bad cops.

I'm a law-abiding citizen. Minus some exceeding the posted speed limit here and there, I'm not causing trouble. I also happen to work late quite a bit, which has led to numerous interactions with the police. Nearly all of those have been completely reasonable where everyone was decent and the situation was handled without any issue (usually just a "why are you here at [late time]?" followed up with a reasonable explanation, maybe running plates, in and out in 3 minutes kind of thing). In a very small number of cases, I was met by an adrenaline-pumped idiot who was very obviously itching to rip me out of the car and beat the Hell out of me. I've been berated and goaded by a cop who was doing everything he could to escalate the situation to where he could take stronger action. As I said, it's a very tiny number of issues out of all the times I've had contact with officers and I've always kept my cool and been in the right to the point where it didn't turn into anything. But all it would take is one of those adrenaline-pumped alpha assholes deciding I looked at him wrong and but for a camera recording the incident, he could very easily write up the report such that I was the aggressor and was threatening toward him and resisted arrest, thereby justifying any injuries. With that report and the word of the sworn officer, I end up with a criminal record and losing everything I've earned in life.

And that's why it doesn't matter if there are 99 good cops for every one bad cop. Because that one bad cop can ruin so many peoples' lives. We as citizens are second-class when we file a report or step into a court room trying to stop a bad cop doing bad stuff. What's really needed are for all those cops who are decent people to start standing up against the ones who aren't, start calling them on their bullshit, start reporting them at work, and start testifying on behalf of people who are wronged by them. I understand that that hyper-aggressive adrenaline junky alpha asshole is great to have by your side when you're under fire, but you have a duty and a responsibility to either see that he gets right in the head or see that he finds a new profession where he doesn't have any legal authority. The more you protect assholes like that, the more of them you'll find around you and the more the citizens in your community will distrust and even hate the police.

I support the good cops out there trying to help good and decent people and do the right thing. As for the bad cops out for a thrill? Well at the very very least, I want them off the streets and getting help. Stop protecting them. Stop protecting people who protect them.

Now that's just unfair. Long term storage costs for nuclear "waste" only exist because the government doesn't allow for the reprocessing of perfectly good fuel. If they did, we'd be more like France, where the total final long-term waste of a family of four's entire lifetime fits in a soda can. And as all the usable energy has been removed from it, it actually is waste, meaning there's no energy radiating from it and no danger from it. At which point, those costs look vastly easier to manage and all subsidies can come off with virtually no impact to costs.

Government created a problem (basically a tax) by disallowing the reuse of perfectly good fuel. It then partially solved the problem it created by generating a subsidy to offset the tax. In the meantime, good fuel is wasted, exposed, and dangerous. It's about the dumbest thing in the world, but then again, it was something our government came up with, so at least that makes some sense.

So the Japanese government owns the car engines and the people just pay rent to possess them?

First of all, what on Earth is a "climate denialist"? Are there people who deny that the Earth has a climate? Or is it a farcical misnomer purposely intended to ridicule anyone with the slightest bit of skepticism about something that even the experts aren't 100% certain about? (hint: 95% from IPCC != 100%)

As for your medical advice, the next time you notice your body temperature rise by 1/2 degree in an hour, best go ice bath yourself immediately or you'll soon be dead.

John Snow is an expert in quantum mechanics? Who knew?!

Did they also appear to have their fucking derp faces on while doing this? SCOTUS is supposed to be the court of common sense, where nothing else matters except what makes sense in the light of the US Constitution and being a reasonable human being. What kinds of goddamn idiots are these we've allowed to sit on this court?

Thank goodness this fisherman didn't also throw his old Beatles albums overboard with the fish, since those are "records" under the ordinary meaning of the word. Maybe in all these confirmation hearings, instead of asking potential SCOTUS justices a bunch of stupid hypothetical questions they won't answer anyway, we should use the time to figure out if the person is a moron who will do stupid shit like this.

The human race is a child sitting in the control room of an old Soviet nuclear power plant. A light started blinking red and some of us think we may have done something to make it start blinking red. What you're arguing is that rather than taking the time to understand how a nuclear power plant operates and what the controls in front of us do and what that blinking light means, we should start pushing buttons to see if we can make the red light go away.

That's suicidally stupid, except it's suicide for all of mankind which makes it worse. We're the only known intelligent species in the entire universe living on the only planet in the entire universe which is known to sustain life. We have a responsibility to maintain that life. Purposely screwing with the conditions on that planet without having a solid understanding of how the climate operates is completely insane and irresponsible. A responsible course of action is to take reasonable measures to limit known impact points (i.e. things we know for a fact have a measurable and directly observable negative environmental impact) while we seek to gain an understanding of the system as a whole.

So, modern nuclear power it is. Start mass producing CANDU reactors (CANDU 6es and ACR-1000s) around the world while pushing ahead with research to convert them to using Thorium so we never run dry. Put them everywhere that needs power and that can't use geothermal. Standardize on common-sense, workable regulations (starting with eliminating any stupid anti-reprocessing rules) and plow through any NIMBY BS put up by local ignorant fools. Within 20 years, you'll have replaced all fossil fuel electricity production with something that actually works and provides plenty of power for everyone.

Sure it is. It requires a huge up-front cash investment for construction, but running costs are quite low. Complete the work to replace other fuels with Thorium and you've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 years of power for the entire planet at current rates of use. Increase usage by two orders of magnitude and we're down to maybe 1,000 years if we never put another penny into energy R&D.

Oh darn.

He's correct in what he said, just not why he said it.

Good science isn't political at all; it merely describes reality. Climatology, as groups like the IPCC present it, isn't good science. It's a bunch of fudge-factor-laced models and ignored observations tightly wound around a political agenda. Basically, ignore what you can't explain, place assumptions anywhere the data is incomplete, draw conclusions that don't match up to reality, and pretend it all makes sense because you have "consensus".

That's not to say there's nothing usable in the whole thing. The problem is that we need better data collection, more data collection, and a lot more work put into understanding the underlying mechanics of the system as a whole before we start drawing wide-reaching conclusions about the drivers of the whole thing. The data needs to be put into real context and that means realizing the limitations and inaccuracies inherent in the proxy measurement techniques we have today and not trying to use some statistical fuzzy math to come up with some make-believe historical record.

But back to what he said, he's right in that the political nature of the "Global Warming/Climate Change" zealotry isn't science. It does, however, bear a striking resemblance to many cults.

The headline is quite inaccurate. The processors are doing what they're designed to do; approximate the results of certain operations to a "good enough" value to achieve an optimal result:work ratio. Sort of like how the NFL measures first-downs with a stick, a chain, and some eyeballs rather than bringing in a research team armed with scanning electron microscopes to tell us how many Planck lengths short of the first down they were.

This is a documentation failure. They're fixing the documentation. For anyone who would actually care about perfect accuracy in these kinds of operations, there are any number of different solutions to achieve the desired, more accurate result. The headline and the summary make it seem as though there's a problem with the processor which is simply incorrect.

Financing can be cheaper than cash depending on the rate and the rate of inflation.