Would You Prefer Your Hand Cut Off or 35 Years in Prison?

I don't know - perhaps a better lawyer?

Probably freedom. You can get a prosthetic hand but you can't reclaim 35 years...

First of all, he DIDN'T create RSS! According to wikipedia, in line with what I remember:

", the first version of RSS, was created by Dan Libby and Ramanathan V. Guha at Netscape. It was released in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. "

There IS a second vrsion, that obviously came years later that is different, but even THAT is problematic. There was a fork down at least two totally different paths"

If it were publically funded, he's RIGHT! Colleges/universities do WAY to much that borders on THEFT, etc.... One guy once went to a university, and I guess for his doctorate had to come up with a thesis....

You guys may ALREADY know where I am going with this! His thesis was VERY valuable, but probably just collecting dust somewhere. It turns out that the university decided to reduce its interest in that area. Anyway, the student took his idea for a storage device, and ran with it. he even started a computer company. TO THIS DAY the term is used in SCIFI and with main frames, etc... IBM owes a lot of their success to it. Apparently JUST after it seemed all but dead, eventually it was replaced by ICs in the 1970s or so(They started in 1951), the university was challenging ownership claiming THEY owned the technology because of the thesis.

Frankly I would want option C ALSO. I only know of ONE type of society that cuts off a persons hand for stealing, and I wouldn't want to live in that place ANYWAY!

WOW, wikipedia says "Swartz was a member of the RSS-DEV Working Group that co-authored the "RSS 1.0" specification of RSS,[2] and built the Web site framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library."

So it says nothing about HIS creating RSS! The first RSS version was .9. I guss they just wanted to stay with the version number, etc... and didn't feel earlier versions were releasable. That is fairly common these days. Linux was pretty mature before v1 was a rumor.

Steve

Do I get to choose which hand? :rolleyes:

Or choose the prison? (I'm going to Norway!)

If they take the hand, am I then entitled to disability payments?

Just because something was federally funded, does not mean that it belongs to the public. If that were the case I should be able to walk into any GM dealership and walk out with the auto of my choosing.

That being said -- the "possible" punishment didn't fit the crime for sure. Especially when you consider that there are murderers walking around that have served less than half of that amount.


To answer the original question - I would also give up my hand.

Hand cut off.

I think I would let them have the right hand, then I would have a guitar pic prosthetically attached . Might not be the best finger picker anymore, but I wouldnt have anything better to do for the rest of my life then to become the world best flat picker, and wouldnt lose 35 years.

Can I keep the hand? I'd like to take it to a taxidermist to get it mounted in a "flipping the bird" pose.

Since a change of venue isn't viable, is deportation an option?

Sometimes it pays to be a Canadian, eh?! :p


j/k

What if, after choosing and executing the 35 years of prison, you lose a hand in say, an accident while building a new bookcase in your workshop? Now that would be disturbing.

On a more serious note, although I haven't studied the US judicial system, I don't like their whole idea (well, the Common Law principle, to be more exact) of adding up sentences to a total. Theoretically, if one steals three times, and gets 7 years for each theft, one would get a total of 21 years in prison, but a person who shoots another person dead can get somewhere in that neighborhood. What's the logic? Clearly the thief is much less dangerous to the society than the murderer, but they get similar punishments.

Of course, there are a lot of intricacies, probably some exemptions to the rule, and better chances that the theft could be released earlier on good behavior than the criminal, but still, the principle is not something I am fond of. I think the Civil Law's principle of adding an increment to the biggest punishment in case of multiple crimes is better. (Like a bonus, you know?)

That's why I can't understand how the Reddit guy could have faced 35 years in prison for hacking a database ... (It's not like he leaked sensible or classified information.)

First thing I'd ask is 2 questions:

1) Is it a mandatory 35 years or 35 years flat where you can be paroled in 10 years?

2) In the country this "crime" was commited, how often and how regularly do they make changes to their legal system and laws? In America, laws are changed every single day and murderers with life are released based on loopholes in the system.

So knowing a bit about the law that was broken, controversy behind the law, etc is really important. You may decide to chop your hand off than find out 2 years down the road that the law was changed and you would have been released.

With that said, there is a story about a guy who got trapped in a mountain, and had to choose between death or chopping his own arm off.

His arm was stuck to a rock, and this particular man slowly cut his own arm off. There is even a movie that was made about this called "127 hours". And it is one crazy movie to watch. The story is even crazier to read about online. This man cut his own arm off with a dull blade, and broke 2 bones in his elbow to detach the arm from his body... so he didn't die.

So if it was a mandatory 35 years, thats a good portion of a persons life.
Even if there was a chance of the legal system changing, I'm not sure I would bet on it.

So as long as someone else was doing the chopping, I'd probably pick losing the hand. Then I'd write a book about it to fund my new robotic hand. =]

And seriously, like most people said, the best decision is to fight both scenarios. Problem is that in the real world, that doesn't always work. It would be a tough decision, but as long as it wasn't my left hand (I'm a lefty) I'd have to go with decaputation here.

-Red

ps. If you want a really tough question this is one that me and my brother asked ourselves when we were kids. Even today you can stump 9 out of 10 people with this question:

"If you had the choice to get doused in gasoline and lit on fire, or get thrown into a pack of hungry lions... which would you choose?"

I know, its deep. I still haven't figured out which would be worse.