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One of the most striking facts about the recent Oslo massacre and bombing by an extremist 32-year-old Norwegian was the sheer amount of pre-meditation that went into the grisly act.

There is somehow an unsettling notion that all of these senseless deaths could have been prevented had all the facts been considered ahead of time.

If Dostoevsky were to have written his masterpiece Crime and Punishment in the 21st century, Fyodor Mikhailovich - himself accused of a crime and sent to a firing squad in Siberia - would surely have reversed the plot line of the story. The inspector Porfiry would surely have detected Raskolnikov hours - if not days - before his murder of the old pawnbroker in her St. Petersburg apartment. Instead of Raskolnikov slowly but surely submitting to the guilt and terror of having commited the crime after the fact, he would have surely posted his Nietzschean superman manifesto online -- and maybe even tweeted about it -- a few hours beforehand. Without a single violent act being committed, the police authorities would have initiated his arrest and put his eventual Siberian exile into motion. But at what cost to the moral fabric of society?