Most if not all carbides will readily scratch sapphire, although in fairness you're not going to encounter many of them unless you work in a machine shop.

Actually, on the basis of the production of an unwinnable war, we could go back to 1971 when Nixon declared the "war on drugs". This has been the justification of any number of bad policy (seizure laws and practices in particular), although generally more in the context of law enforcement than the military itself.

But your problem is you disagree with the voting community not that they aren't accountable to it.

It's not a difference of opinion with the voting community. It's that that prosecutors and law enforcement officers are generally not elected positions, and thus any "accountability" to the public is arm's length at best. The district attorney himself may be elected, but his staff certainly is not. As I said before, what we have now is what you're already suggesting, and it *doesn't work*. Cops can cost their departments hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil judgments, and they continue working as they did before even in the presence of overwhelming public support to have them removed. Prosecutors run roughshod over the rights of people, and it takes a huge media interest and the efforts of wealthy people to get merely the most egregious examples dealt with. The Duke lacrosse case showed that quite clearly. You get exactly as much justice as you can afford, and no more in these situations. Often the public is not even aware of what's going on, so is it okay for individuals to be financially ruined or carry around an undeserved criminal record just because the voters didn't make a big stink about it?

That's not good enough. That's the way the system works now, and what we have now provably doesn't do enough to curb the abuses often seen in either group. Both groups need to be personally accountable for their actions, beyond the lip service to accountability that they already have, but for all practical purposes doesn't exist.

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. ;-)