It's hard to argue with your logic. I've seen multiple cases of such talks happening and resulting in "happy estimations" and think it's all the matter of project management culture. This is very deep topic but it is possible to refer to two basic issues without going deep:

• 1. YOU are specialist and if you're saying it takes X time, management should listen. One way I used to measure programmers efficency was estimation/correction ratio and it quite worked (After working with people for at least 2 months I usually knew if they over- or underestimate work)
• 2. Uncertainty can be estimated and there are many methods to do this

I recommend the book Reinventing Project Management by Shenhar, Dvir if someone is interested (it describes approach models for various projects). I think it is important to acknowledge that not every organization wants to deal with delays, stress etc. - some are just what they are and are not willing to change.

It's not that bad. I bought some time ago NDS Lite. After a while screen calibration started to malfunction (well known problem). As I was in "not supported country" Nintendo haven't even respond for any of my e-mails. After 6 month I was left with piece of junk with no way of fixing it. So - what's left Microsoft? Come on..

Wait a sec... from what I see iPhone has been released 29 June 2007 and on the US Patent Office webpage I can see filled date April 11, 2008. Release date for iPhone touch is even earlier.

Does it mean, that Apple patent is invalid due to prior art thing?

It's pretty obvious that death penalty does not deterr crime. It can even push it up. I can bet that if someone commits a crime for which he knows he will get killed - he won't have any limits anymore. So he can get even more brutal.

However that is NOT the point. There are 3 other things on the topic: punishment, costs and safety.

Do you really think, that serial murderer will get his punishment in prison? That anyone will ever touch him? He will be the king of the hill exploiting other prisoners who commited lesser crimes. If one is strong mentally he can even persuade others to become more violent when their penalty is done.

As for costs - let's assume that the criminal killed your mother/wife/daughter. Congratulations - now you will pay his "rent" for the rest of HIS life. It might be 1$ per month, but - still you do that, by taxes etc. It's pretty bad if state can't pay of your medical treatment (because lack of money) but they HAVE to pay for prisoners (you don't want them to run free anyway).

As for public safety - you can't guarantee that someone convicted for life will be there until end of his life. Law changes, amnesties come and go, and it might happen that murderer eventually will go out after 30-40 years. Sure, he will be 70-80, but if his psyche is broken, he might want to fell the thrill of the murder once again.

I thought about solution for above problems (cost - things) and I came up with this one: While law should allow for this kind of conviction there should be possibility that someone can "save" prisoner from his fate either by taking him in (countries massively against death penalty for example) or paying for his stay at prison.

However there is one single flaw in this solution. While people like to yell how much they are against death penalty there are only a few, who want to take actions against it.