Are you kidding me? All human lives are valuable, without exception. Any other belief is, frankly, uncivilized and reeks of a primitive us-versus-them mentality. What's worse is that prisoners are explicitly under the protection of the state. If an unarmed prisoner is injured in an act of violence, it ought to be interpreted as a total fuck-up and a warden had better lose his job.

Medicine has a strong connection to science. Most of the major initial contribution to the life sciences were made by physician-scientists. Having studied medicine (I am an MD/PhD student), I can tell you that it is essentially impossible to "memorize textbooks and regurgitate on command" without building a mental model of the underlying biology or physiology. While there is a strong need to build a base of knowledge, there is also a continuing need to be able to critically evaluate the scientific literature. I would say that any medical program that doesn't promote critical thinking and scientific literacy is a program in need of reform. My experience with the basic sciences faculty, however, has been that they spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to best train students to be critically evaluate scientific ideas.

This is an empirical question. A quick Google search reveals this study on withdrawal in daily marijuana users: Marijuana abstinence effects in marijuana smokers maintained in their home environment (PDF link). Bottom line is that clinically significant withdrawal symptoms were observed in that population.

I couldn't find find a really good source for addictive potential in the literature (which is not to say there isn't a good source).

However, you may find this article in the Lancet (Pubmed link) to be of interest. The study is "Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse". One criterion used was abuse potential. Long story short: (a) cannabis ranked as a middle-of-the-road substance in terms of harms, and (b) legal classification of drugs in the UK does not correlate well with degree of harms.

Seriously? Everything you describe in your post is destructive: you slam doors (literally and figuratively), are abusive for no purpose and overall take pride in acting out of hatred instead of out of compassion. The world is rarely improved by destruction. A more constructive approach would be to figure out (a) what are the forces that drove criminality in the first place, and (b) how you can help that person avoid taking the wrong path next time. Were I in the position you describe of meeting this man, I hope that I would do my best to reach out and help a human in a tough spot.

All humans - without exception - have worth. I'm not content to have our system chew up a human and spit him out so that he can 'serve as a warning to others'. It's would be act of cowardice to sacrifice a human just so others might fear the law and you might gain some small bit of security. The better solution is to treat everyone with humanity - giving people the benefit of the doubt - so that those who have chosen wrong can sincerely regret it and return to civilization. Don't you wish others would give you the benefit of the doubt when you've screwed up?

I do not speak to offend (and apologize if my diplomacy skills are insufficient to have prevented that), but to see if I might point out that perhaps your plan isn't the best and to honestly ask you re-assess how you would treat other humans.

Agreed this is the best solution. Do you really think it's only ~30 bucks? I run a linux server 24/7 and assuming power consumption of about 100 watts (=.1 kW) and 10 cents /kw-hr I calculate: .1 kW * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year * $0.1/kw-hr = $87. Still low obviously. I am wondering if my power estimate (100 W) is off by a lot. Without busting out some tools to measure it, I'm mostly left guessing.

Sorry, I don't mean to be pedantic; I'm actually just curious if you think the back-of-the-envelope calculation is accurate. I'd be nice to have an estimate for it.

Yes, I'd agree with this. Nobody reads man pages for fun, but will happily read them to figure out why things aren't working when they have a goal in mind. Give them a basic (interesting!) project to do (parse some data to do something neat or somesuch?), tell them about man pages and other internet resources and let them have at it. Be around to help if things don't work though: don't forget how incredibly frustrating getting stuck during debugging in an unfamiliar system can be.

As a fellow biomedical researcher, I think you're correct that most of us wouldn't want any applicable science to be withheld from anyone on the basis of their ideology. However, I think you're still wrong that you'd rather see people living up to their beliefs when the result is morbidity or mortality. I'd much rather encourage a person to accept treatment (that from my point of view is ethical) and live as a hypocrite if the alternative is to die because we advise them to stick to their beliefs. Life is too valuable.

Yes. Revenge is no basis for a moral system of government.

Perhaps this is a case of citation needed? I think it has been established that there are acute autoimmune reactions to vaccine (e.g. Guillain-Barre Syndrome/AIPD), but I've had some difficulty verifying that there is a consensus that vaccines are a long term autoimmune disease risk factor. You do make a good plausibility argument (consistent with the molecular mimicry model), so I would be willing to believe if it there were some studies done.

I have considered that the law is implemented under the constraints of reality. Besides, you have mischaracterized my suggestion: I propose that age limits be replaced by something with higher predictive power (for example, objective knowledge-based exams) across a wide variety of issues: voting, driving, consent to contracts, etc. Would this really be that insane of a process to administer? It would be slightly more complicated than administering - for example - citizenship exams to resident aliens.

Obviously the law must protect those who are incapable of protecting themselves; I do not object to this. In fact, I even believe that in the Polanski case that the law has correctly identified the girl as someone who needed protection. What I object to is far more general: the very simplistic way in which the law determines who is competent to represent their own interests and who must continue to be classified as under the protection of the state. Even if you think my proposal is not the way forward, the response then isn't to support the status quo, but rather to acknowledge the failures and ageism inherent in the law and seek innovative ways of dealing with these problems.

While I appreciate that you're trying to point out that no formal legal system can ever deal with the complexity of civilization (true), I'm not sure that this follows that these types of very simple laws are appropriate. The law (and the legal process) specifies an algorithm for society to handle these complexities, and - frankly - laws of the type "If you are of age X, you may do Y; otherwise not" are horrible in that they have (in my experience, anyway) pretty high false negative rates (a younger person being restricted incommensurate with the ability). A more effective algorithm would be to authorize some group (spreading power away from individual assholes) to determine the capacity of specific minors thus removing some of the obvious failures of the law.

I'm not saying this is the end-all solution for this, but I'm not exactly a legal scholar and even I see obvious ways to craft better legislation. We pay our legislators enough -- demand better quality!

I don't know: The argument sounds reasonable from a pedagogical perspective, but I'm not sure that it rings true with experience. I mostly taught myself how to program and only until I took a course on assembly in college did I encounter this type of teaching tool. I am not convinced that this sort of pen-and-paper debugging really taught me anything I didn't already learn from debugging using the computer. Mostly, it was an exercise in 'figure out where I made a small math error when updating one of my registers'.

On the other hand, code review can be extremely useful especially when attaching a debugger has been fruitless. Obviously it would be stupid to say that understanding the logical flow of your programs is somehow a useless skill. Code review is also a skill that I think is under-appreciated by teachers of programming.

YMMV, obviously. Perhaps like everything, different strategies work well for different students. Maybe the best compromise I saw was in Russell and Norvig's AI book wherein algorithms were described in pseudocode which was general enough to convey high-level thoughts but specific enough to capture important implementation details.

A 1997 article in the New England Journal of Medicine even seems to indicate that the cost of having a mixed population of nonsmokers and smokers (like we do now) costs less (strange as that sounds to me) than a completly non-smoking population in the long run due to the exact way in which the following factors balance out: (a) smokers do not live as long, but (b) smokers consume more health care resources while still alive. The taxes against smoking has everything to do with promoting a public health policy (the wisdom of which can be supported or denied individually) and not much to do with somehow forcing smokers to pay for the (non-existent, according to NEJM) additional long term social costs of smoking.

Just to be clear though: Smoking cessation is the number one positive thing a smoker can do for their health and I wholeheartedly encourage any smokers to seriously think about if they're ready to quit and speak with their family physician about it.