Keeping such offenders confined for long periods of time in a proper special handling unit serves the same purpose, but with one less death (the offenders).

Note that I don't have any sort of "soft spot" for dangerous offenders. What I'm more concerned about is a) what it does to those who have to complete the sentence ("the executioner"), and b) what message it sends to society at large. Capital Punishment is less about justice than it is vengeance; I often see a certain harshness in general with many people in the US population when it comes to the penal system that doesn't seem to exist as much elsewhere in the Westernized world, and it's easy to see lots of instances of mass murderers in the US who seem to feel it's their right to go out and take out anyone who has ever wronged them as "retribution" (the case of the recent Santa Barbara rampage would be a good case in point). That's certainly not to say that there aren't other things significant wrong with such people, but when your society glorifies death as a solution to problems, would it be all that surprising to find that maladjusted children who grow up in such a society take that message in the wrong direction?

Back to a) however. You can't execute someone without an executioner, and unless you find an otherwise law-abiding psychopath to do the job, it messes people up. As mentioned in my last post, the Arizona warden who officiated their last gas chamber execution threatened to quit if he ever had to do it again. I recall reading recently that Ronnie Lee Gardiners executioners all asked never to be asked to perform that duty again. Back when many countries still had professional executioners (many less than 100 years ago), many of them wound up being alcoholics with PTSD who had failed marriages and died relatively young (John Robert Radclive, state executioner of Canada between 1892 and 1899, started drinking after one particularly disturbing incident where a sheriff had him hang a man who had died on his way to the gallows; he died of alcohol related illness at the age of 55. On capital punishment, he later in life had this to say: "I had always thought capital punishment was right, but not now. I believe the Almighty will visit the Christian nations with dire calamity if they don't stop taking the lives of their fellows, no matter how heinous the crime. Murderers should be allowed to live as long as possible and work out their salvation on behalf of the State.").

I'm also not a fan of the idea of "the state" killing its own citizens -- for any reason. But I won't get into that at the moment.

That pretty much exhausts what I have to say about the subject, other than to thank-you for the polite and reasoned discourse. It's been interesting to see where our stands on the subject both intersect and diverge. I'm sure we could both agree that the ideal solution would simply be for our fellow citizens to no longer rape, torture, or kill others, mooting such debates in the future.

Yaz

I would think that would be its own can of worms. Ever try to administer oral medication to someone who doesn't want it? Besides which, anti-anxiety medication doesn't prevent you from having free will -- you'd still probably try to hold your breath if you're still conscious, particularly if you didn't want to die. The fight to live is quite strong for a lot of people.

Gas can be tricky to handle -- chambers have to be adequately sealed, and then have to be properly vented before anyone can enter the room to retrieve the deceased. In the case of the traditional hydrogen cyanide previously used by the US in gas chambers, the chambers had to be scrubbed by personnel in safety gear and oxygen masks using anhydrous ammonia before it would be safe to enter. Obviously this isn't a concern with nitrogen, but you still can't just open the door and walk in. The room would still need to be vented into the wider atmosphere prior to entry, and replaced with normal air. But I agree -- with adequate engineering and routine maintenance, it's probably more foolproof than sticking a needle in a vein.

Then again, the whole concept of capital punishment seems barbaric to me. Then again, I live in a country that hasn't executed anyone in over 50 years. Americans spend so much time, effort, and money into trying to figure out the most humane way to kill people, the endless court cases and legal wrangling, the inequity in its application, the number of people later exonerated as having been innocent, and for what? It has no deterrent value. It doesn't bring lost loved ones back to life. It has a tendency to negatively mess with the heads of the people carrying out the sentence (Arizona, for example, changed their primary method to lethal injection after the warden of the prison that carried out the last gas chamber execution in that state threatened to quit if he ever had to officiate over another gas chamber execution). The best solution to the problem isn't try to to find yet another way to kill people -- its to stop killing people in the first place.

Yaz

It's always amazed me that Americans, who are one of the absolutely most distrustful of their governments in the entire westernized world, are often more than happy to permit said governments the power to kill their fellow citizens.

I've never been able to understand how the electric chair was every able to surmount "cruel" and "unusual". Certainly the very first use of the electric chair would have to, by definition, constitute "unusual", and it only takes a few uses to see that it is substantially cruel.

Yaz

I'm pretty sure they would have had some idea had they been marched manacled into a steel-walled room with sealed windows and an airlock-style door, strapped into a chair, and told they were now about to die by nitrogen asphyxiation.

It's potentially painless and humane when it's completely unexpected, but you can't say that about someone undergoing the ritual that is capital punishment. There is no correlation between the two.

Yaz

Coincidentally, it's the same number as were kidnapped, raped, tortured, and eventually killed after the state of Florida put Bundy in prison.

I'd also note that apparently none of the 66 people executed in Florida since Bundy were particularly deterred by Bundy's death.

Harder to calculate, of course, is how many murders have occurred in Florida since by people raised with the belief that murder == vengeance == justice via the example of state-sponsored killings like Bundy's.

Yaz

Fast, painless, and peaceful if you're resigned to your death, sit or lie quietly, and inhale.

Slow, painful, and less peaceful if you try to fight it by holding your breath.

Of course either way the victim can experience convulsions prior to cardiac arrest, which is neither peaceful nor particularly pleasant to watch.

So in reality -- basically the opposite of what you posted.

Yaz

AC posted an excellent response here.. In the event you're filtering AC's, take the time to read it, as it's completely on point.

I would add is this: if you've never completed a Masters thesis or Doctoral dissertation, just try submitting one to your committee without adequate citations. If you write somewhere "I used well-known algorithm ABC because of XYZ" and you don't have a citation for that algorithm, you'll be sent back for rewrites pretty quickly to add appropriate citations.

By way of example, in my Masters thesis several years ago, I mentioned Unix diff , without a citation. Why would this need a citation? It was mostly mentioned in passing, and every computer scientist under the sun knows what diff is, right?

Committee came back asking for further citations on a few things, including diff (which, for the record, is "Hunt, J. W., and McIlroy, M. D. An algorithm for differential file comparison. CSTR, 41 (1976).")

Using citations isn't an appeal to authority. It's akin to using an existing library call in programming. Just as you wouldn't roll-your-own quick sort algorithm when coding, someone writing a scientific paper doesn't re-invent every algorithm ever derived. You find someone who has already done that, and you cite them. The AOCP is useful in this regard due to the sheerly massive number of algorithms Knuth describes. It's hard to go through a Computer Science program and not use one of these algorithms. Knuth himself likewise cites all of the algorithms in the AOCP, so it's not an appeal to his authority, as he delegates that out to others appropriately. It's simply useful because instead of having to track down papers written in the 1960's on your own, you can cite Knuth who cites those papers for you. This is why the AOCP is useful for a graduate student.

FWIW, I cited Knuth. I needs an algorithm to calculate variance, and another on the Box-Meuller transformation. Art of Computer Programming had one for each, which I adapted for my needs, and cited appropriately.

Yaz

Mod parent up. This is the correct response.

Yaz

Sure, for the average programmer these days who relies on existing libraries, these probably aren't all that useful.

As a grad student working on a thesis and other papers however, Knuth's books are invaluable for citations. Need to defend the use of a specific algorithm? Cite Knuth. His books were invaluable citation material for when I wrote and defended my thesis a few years back.

This is, of course, good science. You may not need to use Knuth to program your own B* tree, but you have a pretty much universally accepted reference for citation if you use one in your research.

Yaz

Perhaps, but it's still potentially going to be a very large, costly job, which probably won't gain enough addresses to make it worth anyones while. It would still take them at least a few months.

The problem here is how many organizations with a large allocation (like a /8) have allocated these addresses within their organizations. Typically, they don't go around doling out the addresses in a completely contiguous manner -- they may have done something akin to setting up a /16 for each building (they would have received their address block before CIDR, and thus would have had to spit things along glassful lines), out of which different labs may have got a /24 to use however they wanted. Readdressing all of these and setting up new routes for all of these subnets is a big job for a large organization like MIT. You'd have to combine subnets together, which would change the routing topology, and compress everything down into a few /16's to make the returned address space contiguous.

You could return non-contiguous space, however this has a serious negative impact on world-wide routing tables. You can't just add a few million /28's to the global routing table (that is, you can't just say "hey, here's a few hundred thousand non-contiguous groups of 16 addresses we aren't using, let's give them back!").

And after putting all that effort into making their address space more contiguous (while still allowing room for future growth), they'd probably wind up with enough addresses to extend IPv4 for a month or two at best -- at which point, they might as well have put the effort into migrating to IPv6 instead.

Giving unused address space only slightly delays the inevitable. It does't postpone it indefinitely. If you're going to do the work, you might as well do it right the first time and get everything running on IPv6.

Yaz

Actually, you get a prefix -- either a /48 or a /64, from which you can assign your own addresses. A /64 is enough to give you more addresses than the entire public IPv4 Internet. How you use them internally is up to you.

Yaz

Exception that on a 8-bit computer running at only a handful of MHz, using a 64-bit address right off would have entailed a performance penalty. There would be more packet overhead, and more address processing required.

This may not seem like a bad compromise for clients, but you have to consider what would have happened to routers in the 70's and 80's had 64-bit addresses been the norm. Won't anybody think of the routers?

Yaz

History of Autism

"Autism" as it is currently used was defined in 1938. The first vaccines were developed in the late 1700s, however, the first of the components of what are now the MMR vaccine were introduced in 1963 with the first measles vaccine (Timeline of Vaccines)

.

Really, so how many times a day should I beat my autistic daughter who is completely unable to speak because of her condition? Do you recommend using paddles, straps, or electrocution? Maybe I should just lock her in a closet and feed her a bucket of fish heads once a week? Please Doctor Anonymous, share your wisdom!

Yaz

Of course not. You'd have to prove the existence of a soul scientifically before you could even start to answer such a question.

It would be no different than asking a zoologist about the mating patterns of the one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater. All research is built upon the foundations of prior research; as there is no scientific evidence for a one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater, there is no logical place to start in trying to deterring what it's mating patterns might be like.

You have to be careful with such statements, as they're the sorts of arguments people of faith like to try to use against science (i.e.: "But science can't prove/disprove X", where X is some construct for which there is no scientific basis in the first place, but which the speaker treats as a given). This is a fallacious line of argument, one which nobody can ever actually learn anything from.

Yaz