Bob_Church

There are already a lot of Federal government committees and stuff about highway safety and cars in general. I'm sure it will get rolled into one of their duties.

Wow. I just saw the PBS Nature episode on this. To be honest, he hadn't been 'up to the task' for some time, but it's still a loss. Fucking poachers And the fucking idiots who think that "rhino horn" has magical properties And yet there are people who think the poachers need protection too. It's war but some people can't accept that. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-38909512

Maybe now that they've charged this guy the constant rioting, looting and arson over the woman's death will stop. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/justine-damond-case-minneapolis-officer-arrested-charged-in-shooting-death-of-australian-woman/

Something that I think would really help in the US, but I can't imagine it happening, is a complete rethinking of prison sentences. The first necessary thing would be to ignore public opinion. A couple of years ago a 19 year old kid was sitting next to his 9 year old cousin. He talked her into putting her hand into his pocket and touching his penis. She did it once then refused to do it again. She told her mom and he confessed. He got ten years in prison and the result was a huge protest and attempt to impeach the judge for letting the kid off with a "slap on the wrist." You see that phrase a lot. An inmate punched a prison nurse in the arm, giving her a bruise. She complained of him getting a "slap on the wrist" of three years added to his sentence. Scientists and prison experts need to sit down and take a serious look at what a year in prison is. Then do a realistic, unemotional evaluation of what would be an appropriate sentence for different crimes. How many years of incarceration would it take to help prevent this happening again. What's appropriate, and why pay for more?

Sure, but we were talking about the legal system.

Well, what would you propose? Somebody breaks the law, he goes to prison and serves his/her time, gets out... You'd hope they learned their lesson. Nope, back in they go, for a longer term... then get out... Still didn't learn your lesson? Fuck you, go back for even longer... Sure, some of the 2nd and 3rd blown chance sentence lengths gets ridiculous sometimes depending on the crime, and no, our system isn't perfect. Laws are written to modify sentence lengths every now and then, but there's always going to be people who don't like it. I would propose that you don't jail people for 50 years for petty crimes even if it is a third petty crime. Pedophiles get lighter sentences, much lighter sentences. These zero tolerance things never work. There's a reason judges used to have discretion in sentencing. When I was a kid my uncle Dillard lived under the cloud of "the bitch". No, not his wife, but in West Virginia they had Habitual status where you could be sentenced to life on your third conviction. The keyword being could.

That's the one. I was also going to say Midsummer. People will object saying that the main person there isn't an amateur, which is true, but he's awfully amateurish.

I wonder if the Mango Mussolini ever regrets his hubris at running for the presidency? Had he remained a private citizen his wealth could have allowed him to mock the law forever. As president, all (or much) of his dirty laundry is bound to come out. Certainly it's true that he would have been best off had he simply lost; he could have cashed in on being the aggrieved victim of a rigged system while keeping all his dirt under the rug. Don When he announced himself as an actual candidate I honestly thought it would bankrupt him without his getting anywhere near the White House. I don't mean the election expenses but all of the lost contracts and stuff. It will be interesting to see how this affects his bottom line once it's over in 2 or 6 years.

He had to be euthanized. This leaves two females, both related, and in-vitro but it doesn't sound encouraging. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/20/worlds-last-male-northern-white-rhino-has-died/

Still the greatest stand-up comedy bit of all time. May it never be surpassed, Jerry Baumchen I've been downloading stuff like Jonathon Winters and Rodney Dangerfield and it's amazing how funny they were. My big problem is remembering who to search for. Now, Laurel and Hardy is next. Thanks Dangerfield "My father was a workaholic, if you mentioned work he got drunk. My wife likes to talk to me during sex. The other night she called from a motel." Even his final words were gold. When he was going into the hospital for brain surgery a reporter asked him how long he'd be. "With luck, two weeks, otherwise, maybe 20 minutes." Unfortunately it was the shorter one.

That doesn't change the fact that with self-driving cars it will be something the programmers and designers will have to deal with. The post I was responding to had mentioned "short end of the stick."

This includes England but I'd say pretty much any town or village that has an amateur detective.

I've been watching a series on Netflix** called "Longmire", set in Wyoming. If I believed what I see there, Wyoming, with a population density that hardly registers, would top the list of dangerous places. ** Based on what we now know about people getting fake news from social media sites, I figure that Netflix is as reliable as Facebook memes for getting information, and more reliable than Infowars. I remember when a politician was raising hell because those big western states were getting more homeland security money per capita than places like New York. And people were ignorant to get outraged by it.

It's an old thought problem, like whether or not to toss someone off the lifeboat. In this case, if I remember correctly, there's a runaway trolley heading for five people who can't get off the track. You see this and there's a lever nearby, but if you pull the lever and divert the train it will kill one person who can't get off the track you diverted it to. Do you let things go on as they were? Five people die but you didn't kill them. Or pull the lever. Now only one dies but you killed them. Now cars will have to be programmed to deal with stuff like this.

This is like the old joke about the statistician putting his head in a hot oven and feet in ice water and saying the temperature is perfect. The only real thing determined is a fairly useless statistic about how many murders against total city population. We're saying for instance that people living in the war zone of inner city Chicago are safe because of all the people who live in the safer areas. That might not seem important but when it comes to something like federal aid to cut down on gun violence it gets critical.

y The Trolley Problem becomes reality.

Ever think about all the folks that did long sentences for a simple drug crime that today is no longer a crime? We live, we evolve. Jerry Baumchen The PS) Other than alcohol, I have never used illegal drugs. Simple drug crime? Try life without parole for 50 years for shoplifting. https://www.americanbar.org/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/human_rights_vol31_2004/winter2004/irr_hr_winter04_shoplifting.html Life without parole as an alternative to the death penalty is great, but the courts will probably screw it up by using it for other things. I don't know if there's anything in lwop that stipulates that. Are the examples shown actually a result of three strikes laws? Can one be eliminated without affecting the other? Here's hoping.

But you don't have to change a spreadsheet's full diaper.

Well, the latest I'm reading is that she was crossing a multi-lane street at night, in a location where there is no crosswalk. So I'm expecting a final decision that the car was not at fault. As for the goal of autonomous cars, the SAE has already defined multiple degrees of autonomy from 0-5. See the table "SAE (J3016) Autonomy Levels" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Levels_of_driving_automationv I didn't mean in this case, it's just something I've wondered about. I mean, if you want to drive down Court Street in Athens between classes the first thing you have to do is convince them that you're NOT subject to the three laws of robotics, if you know what I mean. Otherwise they'll find your starved corpse in a cobweb covered car when Summer break gets here.

Is the end game really to put out a car where nobody would have to even know how to drive? Here's the part I really can't even being to work out. I live in a college town and sometimes moving forward is a downright battle of the will between driver and college students in the street (I won't degrade the word pedestrians by referring to them with it). What then?

Because of this, Oregon voted in a Life Without Parole sentence. Prior, 'lifers' could get out in about 20-25 yrs if they kept their noses clean while inside. As you mentioned in your previous post, some of them did kill again. So we fixed it. Now we need to just get rid of the death penalty. And, regarding your earlier post: This 'sentence' thing is usually a state issue. The feds sentencing req'ments are usually for tax evasion, etc.; federal laws. Jerry Baumchen We have Life Without in Ohio but there are already small but growing organizations trying to get it declared unconstitutional, cruel, that sort of thing. And since we're talking about sentences of decades it will take time to see if the sentence survives or not. And of course, this is about public perception so who knows how long it will take for people to start accepting the finality of it if it does hold up. But it's a good move.

Death row itself is hugely expensive, let alone the additional legal costs involved. Get rid of the death penalty and you can afford to keep several times more lifers in prison than you would otherwise have executed. No doubt, but it would also be nice to know that the person sentenced to life in prison isn't going to be your neighbor in a few years.

I can't remember the last time I went into our Post Office and there wasn't a new "have you seen my stolen guns" reward offer in magic marker on a piece of notebook paper pinned to it. It then lists yet another small arsenal in the hands of who knows who.

I agree with all of those things, but the problem is that there are some people who should never be released into public again. We talk as though there are two alternatives, the death penalty or keeping them in prison for the rest of their life. That would be fine except that the government doesn't keep up their end of the contract. Over and over again they release people who were sentenced to spend the rest of their life in prison. If you want to understand why Texas went to a streamlined death penalty you have to look at the case of Kenneth McDuff. In 1966 he murdered three people after raping the woman and was sentenced to three death sentences and life in prison. He was then paroled in 1989. Back on the street he stabbed a man because he was black but that wasn't enough for them to send him back to prison. By the time they caught him again he'd raped, tortured and murdered eight women, putting them in garbage bags and throwing them into ditches. They actually let just under 150 murderers out then. The governor was told he had to lower the number of people in prison and that's how he did it. McDuff was just the worst of them. Even the Manson family members are/were getting parole hearings. If life in prison doesn't mean life in prison then how else do you keep people like McDuff locked away? If the government inadvertently executes an innocent person that's a tragedy. But isn't it also a tragedy when they release someone who was sentenced to never ever leave prison and they kill people? If we get to the point that people trust the government to do what they said they'd do then I think you'll see the desire for the death penalty fade away.

Get some one else to explain it to you. I can't seem to write 2 + 2 = 4 without you misinterpreting or misunderstanding it.