My Mac Mini uses the IBM chips. That means if my box dies, all the software I bought for it is dead too.
Intel Macs have PowerPC emulation (Rosetta, I think it's called) built in, so you can still use almost all your PowerPC software. Obviously the native x86 versions will run much faster, but the emulation isn't bad. I just went from an iBook to a MacBook; big PowerPC applications like Photoshop run at least as fast on the new machine as they did on the old. For the curious, the iBook had a 1.25 GHz G4 and 1.2 GB RAM, vs. a 2.16 GHz Core Duo and 2 GB RAM in the MacBook. So obviously the MacBook is a much more powerful machine -- but given that it is emulation, and how much of a processor and RAM hog Photoshop has always been, I'm impressed.
So I take it you've never dealt with the IRS, DMV, EPA, or most other government agencies that people have deal with on a regular basis.
No, I deal with them all the time, like everybody else. Well, okay, not the EPA, since I'm not really involved in anything that falls under their jurisdiction -- unless you count separating my garbage for recycling, which, BTW, where I live (Minneapolis) is a service provided by the city, and functions quite smoothly. We have three garbage cans instead of one; we separate garbage into paper, plastic and glass and metal, and "everything else"; the city takes care of the rest. Easy, smooth, and painless, unlike everywhere else I ever lived, where if you wanted to bother recycling, you had to drive stuff to the (private) recycling center yourself, no doubt doing more harm than good overall.
Even ATT is more customer oriented, and it's just about the worst the private sector has to offer.
In my experience, AT&T is actually better than the other Baby Bells, or Comcast or Time Warner for cable. OTOH, the last time I dealt with them, (a) it was actually AT&T, not the rebranded SBC, and (b) it was only for long distance, not local service. So I can't say what they're like now. My guess is, they suck just as much as Qwest, which is kind of my point: they all suck. They suck, in fact, just as much as any giant government agency you care to name. And they suck worse than city agencies, which at least can function on a human scale.
Big Anything sucks. Big Business, Big Government, Big Religion -- they all suck. They all have the same pathologies. What the "Anything" is usually matters less than the "Big" part.
I'm a big fan of local ISP's, as they were in the days of dial-up; generally I think they don't suck at all. But the fact of the matter is, with broadband, almost without exception, you have to pay a giant telecom for access. Given the choice between local ISP's competing freely, and municipal broadband, I'd choose the former. But that's not the choice most people get. It's not city vs. local business, it's city vs. big business. And again, in that case, the former makes more sense. If you can come up with an idea for a regulatory scheme that would make it possible for local ISP's to offer broadband access without dealing with the big telecoms, I'd be interested to hear it... and then good luck getting it past AT&T's and Qwest's and Comcast's lobbyists.
Well, that's probably because you don't have a lot of experience dealing with underfunded, understaffed, municipal services.
I used to work for one: Denver Health Medical Center, nee Denver General Hospital, aka "The Knife and Gun Club." Were we perpetually underfunded and understaffed? Yes. Did we manage to be one of the top trauma and emergency medicine hospitals in the nation? Also yes. If you're shot, get in a car crash, or have a heart attack anywhere in the Denver metro area, you're better off at DHMC than any private hospital; and for less dramatic stuff, you're at least as well off. Same thing here in Minneapolis -- when the (city) paramedics and firefighters were pulling people off the I-35W bridge, they didn't take them to private hospitals, they took them to Hennepin County MC. There's a reason for that.
The same thing that's their incentive to maintain all the other things local government provides: did the municiapal fire department become lazy because they've driven the private fire brigades of the 19th century out of business? Contrary to what they seem to teach in US schools, the profit motive is not the sole force for good in the known universe.
Absolutely. I really get tired of the unquestioned assumption that businesses will be more responsive to their customers than governments will to their citizens. The fact of the matter is, once a business gets over a certain size -- and the big telcos definitely fit into this category -- they don't give a shit what Joe Consumer thinks, because they don't have to. They're omnipresent, and if one or ten or a thousand customers get tired of their lousy service, tough; they'll never notice the losses, and the customers either have no choice (as is usually the case with telcos, of course) or the "choice" of dealing with some other megacorporation that's just as bad (as is the case with cell phone companies.) Personally, I'd expect a lot better service from a city-owned ISP than from some Not-So-Baby-Bell that's headquartered halfway across the country and has most of its employees halfway around the world, and makes more money in a week than my city council spends in a year.
You are welcome not to care, of course. Those of us who do care think this is pretty damn cool.
Here's my question: if you don't care, why did you bother to read and comment on the story? There's lots of stuff on/. I don't care about -- pretty much the whole Games section, f'rinstance. Instead making snarky posts in stories about World Of Bloodshed XVII: Ultimate Pixelated Flying Guts Edition about how much I don't care, I just don't bother to read those stories. Gamers who do care, of course, discuss the games in those stories. I see no downside.
Now, you imagination-crippled pathetic mindless worm, go back to whatever sad little things you care about.
Absolutely. All the world's intelligent people should get together, decide what the absolute most important problem is, focus all their intelligence on solving that one problem, and when that's done, decide what the next most imoportant problem is... Forget about art and science and anything even the list bit speculative. We've got important problems, damn it, and we need to solve those problems right now!
GMAFB. Pretty much all the important scientific discoveries in human history were the result of people focusing on things that interested them for no better reason than that, well, those things interested them. Very often the people who observed their work thought it was pointless. And the important technological advances that come from those discoveries, decades or sometimes centuries later, are not obvious applications at the time. People who dismiss science for science's sake would, if they had their way, condemn us to live in a world much like the one the Romans built, a high-level equilibrium trap where technology is just good enough for everyday life, but there is no idea of progress as a whole.
Apparently there is a particular federal judge in Texas who has a history of being very, very friendly to the plaintiffs in patent cases, so lots of patent troll suits get filed there. I can't remember the guy's name, but I read an article about it not long ago. Basically, his particular court has become the Mecca for bullshit patent claims.
Well, I am an animal rights advocate, of the mild sort; I believe animals have rights, and we should respect those rights. OTOH, I also really like meat. And as far as this type of testing goes, IMO it's entirely a Good Thing.
There are well-established standards for the treatment of laboratory animals. Any institution that runs an animal lab is supposed to meet rigorous standards for living space, quality of food, cleanliness, etc., and have a veterinarian on staff (or at least on call) to look after the animals' well-being. They also need to take careful measures to avoid inflicting pain on the animals whenever possible. Now, I'm not saying that all labs live up to this, by a long shot, but I'd be willing to bet that MIT's labs do. And if the standards are followed, then even with the experimentation, the lab animals have much better, longer, healthier lives than their counterparts in the wild. Also, a lot of them end up as pets after their working lives are done; they get to spend their retirement being taken care of, generally very well, by the lab techs who know them best. Honestly, it's not a bad deal.
Well, if they know that the mice are hearing voices, I'm more interested in the technology they used to access their consciousness and read their qualia, than in mental health treatment...
Perhaps they're hearing squeaks? And the researchers observe that the schizophrenic mice will suddenly stop, listen, and then rush off to build a model of the Devil's Tower out of cheese.
No, I would argue they shouldn't stop and search anyone, unless they have probable cause to do so -- and being a white Irishman aged 20-40 is not probable cause.
What you describe in Arlington is precisely racial profiling. If you think it's justified, fine, defend it on its own merits; but don't try to pretend that it isn't what it clearly is. To say, "Treating two people in a car as drug suspects because they're different races isn't racial profiling" is kind of like saying, "I'm not racist because I don't don't burn crosses or anything -- I just don't like black people."
Racial profiling works. I don't see why there's a big deal about it. If some 49 year old white dude fitting my description commits a crime, and I walk past a cop who has a description of the perp, and he doesn't give me a second look, there's something seriously wrong with that.
That's not what racial profiling is. What you're describing is a situation where the cops are (or should be) looking for someone who committed a crime who fits a particular description, and of course race is part of that description. I don't think anyone objects to that. Racial profiling is when cops harass people of a particular race when no crime has been committed, just because they think people of that race might be criminals.
Not racial profiling: "Suspect is a white male, approximately 50 years of age... hey! There he goes!"
Racial profiling: "What're you doing driving around in this neighborhood this time of night, whitey?"
"Where we have gone astray culturally is that we have focused almost exclusively on starting salary as an indicator of the value of the particular major."
What you said:
"since when earning a higher salary has started to be regarded as being 'gone astray culturally' may I ask?"
When you're done beating up on that straw man, maybe you'd like to address what was actually said.
/b/'s actually quite well known, to anyone who's been on the internet for awhile.
No. It's not.
I've been on the internet since before there was such as thing as the WWW. I've worked as a Web developer for several years. I've done large amounts of research online for a wide variety of personal, professional, and academic purposes. I've wasted God-knows-how-many thousands of hours on Usenet, Slashdot, and many other online forums. And until today, I had no idea what/b/ was.
"The internet" is a big place. And with comments like yours, you indicate that your understanding of this vast, complex world is about as deep as Ted Stevens'.
The application of the algorithm will come well after the "full examination by a professional" stage -- they'll be using it once the cancer has been diagnosed, and they're deciding on which of several specific treatments to use.
I will try to make this as clear as I can: when scientists study data, and when from the data they draw a conclusion that heppens to support one political position over another, this is not a sign of political bias. This is a sign that one of the positions is right, and the other is wrong.
claim that science favors the Democrat position on everything...even when last year "science" opposed the same position because the Republicans were pushing it
Examples, please?
Also, what exactly is "the Democrat position?" I assume that what you're trying to say is "the Democratic position," but like many Republicans you seem to be having trouble with the "i" and "c" keys on your keyboard. You might want to get that fixed.
I used to give a lot of creditability to UCS, then I noticed that they always oppose Republicans and usually support Democrats (I would say always, but I might have missed the occasional opposition to a Democrat idea).
A bunch of really smart people whose job it is to study the world in careful detail through the analysis of data notices that the data tend to support Democratic positions over Republican ones. Imagine that.
I can't imagine how it would be possible to fund anything through tax money and not expect the outcome to be determined by the power elite who control that money.
Except that until now, the outcome has not been controlled by the people who control the money; it's been controlled by people hired by the people who control the money, and given the authority to do as they see fit.
This is a lesson that every businessman worth his salt learns early in his career: don't micromanage. Just because you pay the bills doesn't mean that it's appropriate for you to tell your employees how to do their jobs. Hire smart people, make sure they understand the overall goals of the organization, and give them a free hand. If they screw up, that means you hired the wrong people; it does not mean you should try to control every detail of how the job is done.
And it's a lesson the US government learned too, once upon a time -- but now, under our MBA President, is busily unlearning, like just about every other lesson on good governance which history can provide.
In the child-molester scenario you give, I don't see how that's an "abortion of justice." Sure, ideally the molester would be convicted fully of the crime and receive the full sentence, but surely it's better to get a conviction of some kind and avoid further harm to the victim, than to either have the offender go free completely or to continue traumatizing the child.
Also, plea-bargains are an absolutely necessary tool for fighting organized crime. Low-level gangsters may be very bad people, but their bosses are much worse. So if you can get the "soldiers" to testify against the big guys in return for a lighter sentence, it's a win. The fact of the matter is, the power of the Mafia (the original Italian one, I mean) has been largely broken in America by this tactic; this is a Good Thing.
So what we need is to start squeezing the front-line RIAA lawyers... "Look, we know you make your living suing college students and grandmothers and cute fuzzy kittens. We don't think much of that. But what we really want is the guys who pay your bills. So, tell you what: you agree to, say, giving up your law license and your big house and your fancy car, and go work at McDonald's for ten years, and testify against your bosses; and in return, we won't put you up against the wall and shoot you."
The technique for the prevention of AIDs is already well known and well proven. It's got a 100% effective prevention rate.
It's called abstinence.
This is not true; does the name Kimberly Bergalis ring a bell?
It is also true, of course, that the majority of infections are directly traceable to either sexual activity or IV drug use. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of people may be infected by partners to whom they're faithful and who they simply don't know are engaging in risky activity on the side... so what? Should we tell heart attack victims, "Tough shit, pal, you shouldn't have eaten so much McDonald's"? Should we tell people not to drive since that will be (almost) 100% effective in preventing death by motor vehicle accident?
Or maybe we should accept the fact that people will eat crappy food and drink and smoke and not exercise, they will drive cars and climb mountains and walk through bad neighborhoods, and they will have sex whether anyone approves of it or not. And then deal with the results on that basis.
Ahh, well thanks for pointing out the mistakes of the great thinkers that came up with our Constitution and tried to start a truely free society.
They were indeed great thinkers, and they created a political system that was probably the best in the world up to that point. Fortunately, though, they were wise enough to know that they weren't necessarily right about everything, which is why they gave us a way to change the system they created: the amendment process. It is, quite reasonably, designed to be difficult but not impossible.
Don't let the fact that they had the opposite views that political parties are wrong
Some of them thought parties are wrong, not all of them -- and in the event, it didn't really matter; the reason Washington warned against partisanship in his farewell address was because proto-parties were already forming, in fact had already formed during the period of governance under the Articles of Confederation, before the Constitution was even written. If Washington, with his immense personal prestige, couldn't prevent this from happening, no one else was going to either.
and the electoral system is meant to act as a buffer between the people (who panic and will cut their own foot off if they think it will make them safer).
The latent aristocracism many of the Founders carried around with them from their pre-Revolutionary backgrounds was one of their few great mistakes. Fortunately, this is one of the things that's changed in the last couple of centuries. The Long Revolution against the "new breed of glittering men" started in 1776, and got a big boost in 1828, but wasn't really complete until 1865. And like most battles worth fighting, it's had to be fought over and over again.
When I talked about it with my father, he asked me "If it's such a good idea, why is nobody doing it?"
That attitude bugs the hell out me. Every good idea has to start somewhere. And it's one thing to run into it when you're sitting around BS'ing with your Dad, but it's a real problem when you're dealing with, e.g., the non-obviousness standard for patents ("It can't be obvious, or someone would have patented it already!" "You're right -- $STUPID_PATENT_OF_THE_WEEK approved...") or when trying to get a genuinely innovative new business going.
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My Mac Mini uses the IBM chips. That means if my box dies, all the software I bought for it is dead too.
Intel Macs have PowerPC emulation (Rosetta, I think it's called) built in, so you can still use almost all your PowerPC software. Obviously the native x86 versions will run much faster, but the emulation isn't bad. I just went from an iBook to a MacBook; big PowerPC applications like Photoshop run at least as fast on the new machine as they did on the old. For the curious, the iBook had a 1.25 GHz G4 and 1.2 GB RAM, vs. a 2.16 GHz Core Duo and 2 GB RAM in the MacBook. So obviously the MacBook is a much more powerful machine -- but given that it is emulation, and how much of a processor and RAM hog Photoshop has always been, I'm impressed.
So I take it you've never dealt with the IRS, DMV, EPA, or most other government agencies that people have deal with on a regular basis.
... and then good luck getting it past AT&T's and Qwest's and Comcast's lobbyists.
No, I deal with them all the time, like everybody else. Well, okay, not the EPA, since I'm not really involved in anything that falls under their jurisdiction -- unless you count separating my garbage for recycling, which, BTW, where I live (Minneapolis) is a service provided by the city, and functions quite smoothly. We have three garbage cans instead of one; we separate garbage into paper, plastic and glass and metal, and "everything else"; the city takes care of the rest. Easy, smooth, and painless, unlike everywhere else I ever lived, where if you wanted to bother recycling, you had to drive stuff to the (private) recycling center yourself, no doubt doing more harm than good overall.
Even ATT is more customer oriented, and it's just about the worst the private sector has to offer.
In my experience, AT&T is actually better than the other Baby Bells, or Comcast or Time Warner for cable. OTOH, the last time I dealt with them, (a) it was actually AT&T, not the rebranded SBC, and (b) it was only for long distance, not local service. So I can't say what they're like now. My guess is, they suck just as much as Qwest, which is kind of my point: they all suck. They suck, in fact, just as much as any giant government agency you care to name. And they suck worse than city agencies, which at least can function on a human scale.
Big Anything sucks. Big Business, Big Government, Big Religion -- they all suck. They all have the same pathologies. What the "Anything" is usually matters less than the "Big" part.
I'm a big fan of local ISP's, as they were in the days of dial-up; generally I think they don't suck at all. But the fact of the matter is, with broadband, almost without exception, you have to pay a giant telecom for access. Given the choice between local ISP's competing freely, and municipal broadband, I'd choose the former. But that's not the choice most people get. It's not city vs. local business, it's city vs. big business. And again, in that case, the former makes more sense. If you can come up with an idea for a regulatory scheme that would make it possible for local ISP's to offer broadband access without dealing with the big telecoms, I'd be interested to hear it
Well, that's probably because you don't have a lot of experience dealing with underfunded, understaffed, municipal services.
I used to work for one: Denver Health Medical Center, nee Denver General Hospital, aka "The Knife and Gun Club." Were we perpetually underfunded and understaffed? Yes. Did we manage to be one of the top trauma and emergency medicine hospitals in the nation? Also yes. If you're shot, get in a car crash, or have a heart attack anywhere in the Denver metro area, you're better off at DHMC than any private hospital; and for less dramatic stuff, you're at least as well off. Same thing here in Minneapolis -- when the (city) paramedics and firefighters were pulling people off the I-35W bridge, they didn't take them to private hospitals, they took them to Hennepin County MC. There's a reason for that.
The same thing that's their incentive to maintain all the other things local government provides: did the municiapal fire department become lazy because they've driven the private fire brigades of the 19th century out of business? Contrary to what they seem to teach in US schools, the profit motive is not the sole force for good in the known universe.
Absolutely. I really get tired of the unquestioned assumption that businesses will be more responsive to their customers than governments will to their citizens. The fact of the matter is, once a business gets over a certain size -- and the big telcos definitely fit into this category -- they don't give a shit what Joe Consumer thinks, because they don't have to. They're omnipresent, and if one or ten or a thousand customers get tired of their lousy service, tough; they'll never notice the losses, and the customers either have no choice (as is usually the case with telcos, of course) or the "choice" of dealing with some other megacorporation that's just as bad (as is the case with cell phone companies.) Personally, I'd expect a lot better service from a city-owned ISP than from some Not-So-Baby-Bell that's headquartered halfway across the country and has most of its employees halfway around the world, and makes more money in a week than my city council spends in a year.
Why do we care?
/. I don't care about -- pretty much the whole Games section, f'rinstance. Instead making snarky posts in stories about World Of Bloodshed XVII: Ultimate Pixelated Flying Guts Edition about how much I don't care, I just don't bother to read those stories. Gamers who do care, of course, discuss the games in those stories. I see no downside.
You are welcome not to care, of course. Those of us who do care think this is pretty damn cool.
Here's my question: if you don't care, why did you bother to read and comment on the story? There's lots of stuff on
Now, you imagination-crippled pathetic mindless worm, go back to whatever sad little things you care about.
Absolutely. All the world's intelligent people should get together, decide what the absolute most important problem is, focus all their intelligence on solving that one problem, and when that's done, decide what the next most imoportant problem is ... Forget about art and science and anything even the list bit speculative. We've got important problems, damn it, and we need to solve those problems right now!
GMAFB. Pretty much all the important scientific discoveries in human history were the result of people focusing on things that interested them for no better reason than that, well, those things interested them. Very often the people who observed their work thought it was pointless. And the important technological advances that come from those discoveries, decades or sometimes centuries later, are not obvious applications at the time. People who dismiss science for science's sake would, if they had their way, condemn us to live in a world much like the one the Romans built, a high-level equilibrium trap where technology is just good enough for everyday life, but there is no idea of progress as a whole.
many of the articles posted by Mr. Dawson are so obviously (left-)biased
"It's well known that reality has a liberal bias."
Apparently there is a particular federal judge in Texas who has a history of being very, very friendly to the plaintiffs in patent cases, so lots of patent troll suits get filed there. I can't remember the guy's name, but I read an article about it not long ago. Basically, his particular court has become the Mecca for bullshit patent claims.
Well, I am an animal rights advocate, of the mild sort; I believe animals have rights, and we should respect those rights. OTOH, I also really like meat. And as far as this type of testing goes, IMO it's entirely a Good Thing.
There are well-established standards for the treatment of laboratory animals. Any institution that runs an animal lab is supposed to meet rigorous standards for living space, quality of food, cleanliness, etc., and have a veterinarian on staff (or at least on call) to look after the animals' well-being. They also need to take careful measures to avoid inflicting pain on the animals whenever possible. Now, I'm not saying that all labs live up to this, by a long shot, but I'd be willing to bet that MIT's labs do. And if the standards are followed, then even with the experimentation, the lab animals have much better, longer, healthier lives than their counterparts in the wild. Also, a lot of them end up as pets after their working lives are done; they get to spend their retirement being taken care of, generally very well, by the lab techs who know them best. Honestly, it's not a bad deal.
On other words, the life of a lab mouse is very much like that of an IT worker. That's not sane either, but we keep doing it day after day ...
Well, if they know that the mice are hearing voices, I'm more interested in the technology they used to access their consciousness and read their qualia, than in mental health treatment...
Perhaps they're hearing squeaks? And the researchers observe that the schizophrenic mice will suddenly stop, listen, and then rush off to build a model of the Devil's Tower out of cheese.
No, I would argue they shouldn't stop and search anyone, unless they have probable cause to do so -- and being a white Irishman aged 20-40 is not probable cause.
What you describe in Arlington is precisely racial profiling. If you think it's justified, fine, defend it on its own merits; but don't try to pretend that it isn't what it clearly is. To say, "Treating two people in a car as drug suspects because they're different races isn't racial profiling" is kind of like saying, "I'm not racist because I don't don't burn crosses or anything -- I just don't like black people."
Racial profiling works. I don't see why there's a big deal about it. If some 49 year old white dude fitting my description commits a crime, and I walk past a cop who has a description of the perp, and he doesn't give me a second look, there's something seriously wrong with that.
... hey! There he goes!"
That's not what racial profiling is. What you're describing is a situation where the cops are (or should be) looking for someone who committed a crime who fits a particular description, and of course race is part of that description. I don't think anyone objects to that. Racial profiling is when cops harass people of a particular race when no crime has been committed, just because they think people of that race might be criminals.
Not racial profiling: "Suspect is a white male, approximately 50 years of age
Racial profiling: "What're you doing driving around in this neighborhood this time of night, whitey?"
Don't tell me you can't see the difference.
What TFA said:
"Where we have gone astray culturally is that we have focused almost exclusively on starting salary as an indicator of the value of the particular major."
What you said:
"since when earning a higher salary has started to be regarded as being 'gone astray culturally' may I ask?"
When you're done beating up on that straw man, maybe you'd like to address what was actually said.
/b/'s actually quite well known, to anyone who's been on the internet for awhile.
/b/ was.
No. It's not.
I've been on the internet since before there was such as thing as the WWW. I've worked as a Web developer for several years. I've done large amounts of research online for a wide variety of personal, professional, and academic purposes. I've wasted God-knows-how-many thousands of hours on Usenet, Slashdot, and many other online forums. And until today, I had no idea what
"The internet" is a big place. And with comments like yours, you indicate that your understanding of this vast, complex world is about as deep as Ted Stevens'.
The application of the algorithm will come well after the "full examination by a professional" stage -- they'll be using it once the cancer has been diagnosed, and they're deciding on which of several specific treatments to use.
I will try to make this as clear as I can: when scientists study data, and when from the data they draw a conclusion that heppens to support one political position over another, this is not a sign of political bias. This is a sign that one of the positions is right, and the other is wrong.
claim that science favors the Democrat position on everything...even when last year "science" opposed the same position because the Republicans were pushing it
Examples, please?
Also, what exactly is "the Democrat position?" I assume that what you're trying to say is "the Democratic position," but like many Republicans you seem to be having trouble with the "i" and "c" keys on your keyboard. You might want to get that fixed.
When you find a Republican position which either is well-supported by science, or supportive of science, let us know, okay?
I used to give a lot of creditability to UCS, then I noticed that they always oppose Republicans and usually support Democrats (I would say always, but I might have missed the occasional opposition to a Democrat idea).
A bunch of really smart people whose job it is to study the world in careful detail through the analysis of data notices that the data tend to support Democratic positions over Republican ones. Imagine that.
I can't imagine how it would be possible to fund anything through tax money and not expect the outcome to be determined by the power elite who control that money.
Except that until now, the outcome has not been controlled by the people who control the money; it's been controlled by people hired by the people who control the money, and given the authority to do as they see fit.
This is a lesson that every businessman worth his salt learns early in his career: don't micromanage. Just because you pay the bills doesn't mean that it's appropriate for you to tell your employees how to do their jobs. Hire smart people, make sure they understand the overall goals of the organization, and give them a free hand. If they screw up, that means you hired the wrong people; it does not mean you should try to control every detail of how the job is done.
And it's a lesson the US government learned too, once upon a time -- but now, under our MBA President, is busily unlearning, like just about every other lesson on good governance which history can provide.
In the child-molester scenario you give, I don't see how that's an "abortion of justice." Sure, ideally the molester would be convicted fully of the crime and receive the full sentence, but surely it's better to get a conviction of some kind and avoid further harm to the victim, than to either have the offender go free completely or to continue traumatizing the child.
... "Look, we know you make your living suing college students and grandmothers and cute fuzzy kittens. We don't think much of that. But what we really want is the guys who pay your bills. So, tell you what: you agree to, say, giving up your law license and your big house and your fancy car, and go work at McDonald's for ten years, and testify against your bosses; and in return, we won't put you up against the wall and shoot you."
Also, plea-bargains are an absolutely necessary tool for fighting organized crime. Low-level gangsters may be very bad people, but their bosses are much worse. So if you can get the "soldiers" to testify against the big guys in return for a lighter sentence, it's a win. The fact of the matter is, the power of the Mafia (the original Italian one, I mean) has been largely broken in America by this tactic; this is a Good Thing.
So what we need is to start squeezing the front-line RIAA lawyers
People who insist that the 'sexual revolution' (actually just a messy cum-fest) is permanent and forever need to get over it.
Not getting any lately?
The technique for the prevention of AIDs is already well known and well proven. It's got a 100% effective prevention rate.
... so what? Should we tell heart attack victims, "Tough shit, pal, you shouldn't have eaten so much McDonald's"? Should we tell people not to drive since that will be (almost) 100% effective in preventing death by motor vehicle accident?
It's called abstinence.
This is not true; does the name Kimberly Bergalis ring a bell?
It is also true, of course, that the majority of infections are directly traceable to either sexual activity or IV drug use. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of people may be infected by partners to whom they're faithful and who they simply don't know are engaging in risky activity on the side
Or maybe we should accept the fact that people will eat crappy food and drink and smoke and not exercise, they will drive cars and climb mountains and walk through bad neighborhoods, and they will have sex whether anyone approves of it or not. And then deal with the results on that basis.
Ahh, well thanks for pointing out the mistakes of the great thinkers that came up with our Constitution and tried to start a truely free society.
They were indeed great thinkers, and they created a political system that was probably the best in the world up to that point. Fortunately, though, they were wise enough to know that they weren't necessarily right about everything, which is why they gave us a way to change the system they created: the amendment process. It is, quite reasonably, designed to be difficult but not impossible.
Don't let the fact that they had the opposite views that political parties are wrong
Some of them thought parties are wrong, not all of them -- and in the event, it didn't really matter; the reason Washington warned against partisanship in his farewell address was because proto-parties were already forming, in fact had already formed during the period of governance under the Articles of Confederation, before the Constitution was even written. If Washington, with his immense personal prestige, couldn't prevent this from happening, no one else was going to either.
and the electoral system is meant to act as a buffer between the people (who panic and will cut their own foot off if they think it will make them safer).
The latent aristocracism many of the Founders carried around with them from their pre-Revolutionary backgrounds was one of their few great mistakes. Fortunately, this is one of the things that's changed in the last couple of centuries. The Long Revolution against the "new breed of glittering men" started in 1776, and got a big boost in 1828, but wasn't really complete until 1865. And like most battles worth fighting, it's had to be fought over and over again.
We functioned fine without them.
When was this, exactly?
When I talked about it with my father, he asked me "If it's such a good idea, why is nobody doing it?"
...") or when trying to get a genuinely innovative new business going.
That attitude bugs the hell out me. Every good idea has to start somewhere. And it's one thing to run into it when you're sitting around BS'ing with your Dad, but it's a real problem when you're dealing with, e.g., the non-obviousness standard for patents ("It can't be obvious, or someone would have patented it already!" "You're right -- $STUPID_PATENT_OF_THE_WEEK approved