It all stems from the fact that the government never actually is held responsible for its mistakes.

I would argue that it's not the government itself, but the guilty people within the government that should be held accountable. If a cop beats someone up, the department/city gets sued and pays, not the cop himself. Nothing's going to change until those individuals that are willing to go outside the law have some real skin in the game.

IMNSHO, that's about when everything took a major wrong turn, with the neo-cons coming to the forefront.

I think you can pin it down even more accurately to on or about September 12, 2001, when the American public collectively lost their critical thinking skills and bought into practically everything the government told them.

An easy fix to that is to discard plea deals from the evaluation. How many *court cases* you've won, not how many pleas have you forced. It still doesn't fix all of the problems inherent in the current system, though.

For a justice system to function guilty people need to have reason to confess their guilt and engage in a process of reconciliation with the community.

This would need to apply to law enforcement and the prosecution as well. Not going to happen here.

If the crime you're charged with carries a maximum month sentence, you should be out on bail after the month automatically.

If you're still in jail after a month waiting for trial on a charge that only carries a 30 day sentence, you've got a good argument for a Sixth Amendment civil rights case IMO.

I have little respect for Bennett's excessive, often not carefully considered, and mostly useless prose, so I don't come to Bennett threads to actually read what spews forth from his keyboard. I read them because I find the new and different ways he gets panned by the Slashdot readership to be entertaining. He's like the Slashdot Punching Bag - you punch him, and he invariably swings back again a little later for more.

Does the Spock in your universe have a beard?

Closest thing to useful info associated with one of Bennett's posts. Spock's Beard is an awesome band.

Soffit! Soffit right now. Vent someplace else!

This is true for a lot of stuff. Buying a Fender electric guitar? You can get one made in the U.S., or Mexico, or Japan, or China, all priced/featured differently and of varying quality.

Conversely, where I live everything is buried. We lose power for a second or two almost daily, with at least one outage longer than a minute per month.

They break unbelievably fast in comparison to any other brand I've tried.

Some people have problems with Seagate. Some have issues with WD. The Seagates in my soon-to-be-replaced colo box both have 50K+ hours on them, and the SMART logs are still clean as a whistle. I have standbys just in case though. ;-)

It would sure cut a lot of commuting if all a person needed to do to get to work was to take the elevator.

Probably would cut out a lot of time off too - "Dave, I know it's your day off, but can you come upstairs real quick to look at this server issue?"

for the same reasons that automatic transmissions last longer than manual trannies

Unless you know how to properly drive a car with a standard. Standards have far fewer points of failure, and the part that most often is replaced is the clutch, and that usually fails because people ride it or otherwise find a way to burn it up through improper use. Clutch repairs are something I can do in my driveway and are reasonably inexpensive. Practically anything involving an automatic (aside from changing fluid/filter) involves taking it to a shop, and often ends up costing thousands of dollars. There's a reason you don't often see tractor-trailers with automatics, and they can go hundreds of thousands of miles before needing transmission service.

The trucks and vans can be self driving too.

Self-driving trucks will entail a *far* more comprehensive level of automation than cars. Just getting a tractor-trailer to make a successful turn at a tight, busy intersection will be an interesting problem to solve.

Sure frustrated drivers will force their way into the fast lane and jam up traffic (as they do now), but the cars will record the reckless driving, likely by a few 'angles', eventually, it'll become a citation to do it.

It's already against the law to do this (in most places in the U.S., anyway), and I see the police ignore it all the time even when it's happening right in front of them. If they spent half the time on enforcing left-lane and improper turn laws as they do on speeding, they'd have full coffers and much smoother-flowing traffic to boot. Probably would also have a downtick in accidents too.