That's because Halo 2 doesn't actually need directx10. It has a 'is this vista check', and it might use a couple of minor new directx 10 direct3d calls (which can easily be captured and reimplemented in direct3d 9).
Correct. A lot of the rest, well, not so much. And I appologize in advance for tearing into you over this, but I do 3D graphics programming for a living and it just pisses me off to no end how MS's marketing statements have somehow morphed into technical truths when they are clearly not true at all.
In a nut shell, DX10's rendering features can be (and are, under OpenGL) implemented under the old driver model. Vista's shiny 3D desktop and ridiculous DRM (which are separate from Direct3D 10), however, cannot. Microsoft consistently choses to confuse the two, but they are distinct technologies that shouldn't probably don't rely on each other to any significant degree. Details follow.
The real features of directX10 like Video memory virtualization and gpu multitasking (which allows Vista to have multiple direct3d accelerated applications (including the desktop) all running at the same time in (possibibly overlapping windows).
This is all possible on XP with both OpenGL and Direct3D 9. Seriously, get a couple of 3D programs that run in windowed mode and drag them around your monitor. Overlap them. It works fine on XP. Managing the GPU resources is simply done inside the driver. All Vista's model does is move some functionality that used to be common to all drivers up into the kernel, because refactoring things this way allowed them to remove some of the overhead from most D3D API entry points - overhead that exists in D3D 9 (which is obviously not crippled or useless because of it).
The D3D10 feature set could be implemented in XP without rewriting the kernel. There might be more overhead when calling rendering functions, but it probably wouldn't be worse than calling D3D9 functions (and D3D9's API is a lot chattier than D3D10's). There is no D3D10 feature that requires the Vista kernel rewrite.
If you don't believe me then go put a GeForce 8 series card in a XP machine, install the latest driver, and then download GLEW. Get it to dump out a list of available OpenGL extensions (visualinfo.exe in the bin directory, assuming you downloaded the Win32 binaries). Note these extensions in particular: GL_EXT_geometry_shader4, GL_EXT_texture_array, GL_NV_transform_feedback, as well as a few others I don't care to list. Those are all the OpenGL equivalents to the new D3D10 feature set. If NVIDIA can expose D3D10 generation features through OpenGL on an XP driver running on the old XP kernel, Microsoft can do the same thing through Direct3D 10. They simply choose not to.
The only thing the old driver model can't actually do is share graphics resources among multiple processes, something that pretty much no 3D graphics application would ever really do in the first place (because launching processes and getting them to talk to each other is really expensive on Windows), and something which is not required for useful D3D 10 support. Read on to find out why they stuck in a useless feature.
You aren't going to get a proper Compiz or Aqua class desktop for XP because XP simply can't do this stuff. Vista/DirectX10 can.
The shiny 3D desktop thing in Vista is the only thing that really requires the new driver model, as it is what actually makes use of the ability to share D3D resources among multiple processes (it basically shares any 3D app's render surface into its own texture set). And note that the shiny desktop doesn't even use D3D10. It just uses D3D9 plus the extensions to D3D9 that are only available under the new driver model - extensions which only serve to notify applications that their device will (almost) never be lost (mundane window/D3D device setup thing, has nothing to do with actually rendering) and expose th
Yet obviously this country has already spent a lot of time under a gold standard, and it's very easy to verify that during this time inflation was about the same as it is now or slightly worse, and the boom-and-bust cycle was considerably worse. It's really easy to google for graphs of these things, it's not some obscure data.
Yes, and most of that data is from the last century and doesn't account for things like the current level of industrialization, advances in medicine, overall exucation, etc, etc. I mean, really, if we're gonna whip out the charts then why don't we talk about the bust that hit around the 1930's, you know, the only one that the average person knows by name? It happened very shortly after the current system was introduced...
Too many variables have changed over the last hundred years for any such analysis to be even remotely scientific.
If you want to argue that commodity backed money is bad, try this: commodity values are severely dependent on political and economic structures that extend far beyond any one nation's control. That's why I'd be against a gold standard, and it's a much more rational way to argue than comparing pre and post Fed economic charts when almost everything else has also changed.
When the government spends more than it takes in, the treasury department sells bonds.
When the expenses of the U.S. Government exceed the revenue collected, it issues new debt to cover the deficit. This debt typically takes the form of new issues of government bonds which are sold on the open market. However, the debt can also be monetized by which the Federal Reserve creates an entry on its books to credit the US Government for an amount equal to the dollar amount of the bonds the Federal Reserve is acquiring. The money created in this process not only includes the new dollars that came into existence just to purchase the bonds, but much more because this new money is now sitting in the form of checkbook money at the Federal Reserve. Under the scheme of Fractional Reserve Banking this new checkbook money is treated as an asset to lend against. Economists estimate the expansion of the money supply as being many times the amount of the initial money created with the exact amount being a function of what percentage of deposits banks must set aside as "reserves".
Even if that's overblown, you still have this to deal with (from the same article):
A traditional defense of the national debt is that we "owe the debt to ourselves", but that is increasingly not true. The US debt in the hands of foreign governments is 25% of the total, virtually double the 1988 figure of 13%. Despite the declining willingness of foreign investors to continue investing in dollar denominated instruments as the US Dollar has fallen in 2007, the U.S. Treasury statistics indicate that, at the end of 2006, foreigners held 44% of federal debt held by the public. About 66% of that 44% was held by the central banks of other countries, in particular the central banks of Japan and China.
How, exactly, does selling treasury bonds to foreigners (like, say, the Chinese) offset the new dollars circulating in the US economy? I mean, yes, you could say "well, they would have otherwise spent that money into our economy", but you don't know that for sure. And anyway, that's exactly what selling them the bond does, as it allows the government to create and use more money, which is then amplified by the fractional reserve banking system. That money won't be removed from the system until much later, and at that time it's likely to be repaid by simply issuing bonds elsewhere.
Yes, the gold standard is the wrong answer. So is unfettered and irresponsible government spending. And it's just stupid to ignore the fact that this causes inflation which does hurt everyone but the military and the
The entire sentence you quoted from is:
The cause of damage is not yet known, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents. So it's really a question of what "damage" means in this case. Are we talking about a mundane problem that happens on a regular basis (which was only reported due to all the other links going down at around the same time) or did a component that almost never fails suddenly break down under mysterious circumstances?
Not to run against the whole "this could mean only one thing" meme, but I think it's just as likely that some old hardware sitting at the ends of that cable got stressed past its breaking point because having the other links down finally pushed it past its limits.
These are not the Great American WWII Achievements you're looking for. Try one of these, instead:
Seeing as how Europe would be under control of Russia right now, if we Americans didn't come bail you guys out. I don't think you have any room to talk.
Seeing as how Europe would be under control of Germany right now, if we Americans hadn't sold you lots of ammo. I don't think you have any room to talk.
Seeing as how Europe would be significantly less developed right now, if we Americans hadn't spent vast sums of money helping you rebuild your economies after the war. I don't think you have any room to talk. And yes, I am aware that this in no way invalidates your point. I don't care, that isn't my goal. I'm just being pedantic.
The parent said "How can anyone be taken seriously after such a remark?" I answered that question with a legitimate case where people are taken seriously after making far more extreme statements. I hope you didn't confuse a mildly sarcastic tone with, well, all the things you wrote.
The rest of my post attacks the use of emotion-based statements, as a substitute for arguments, in what should be logic-based debates. If you think I'm wrong and that tangential, irrational, and overly-emotional attacks do belong in political and technical discourse then say so clearly and back it up with some reasoning.
Bah, who am I kidding, you're just here to call me names. Tolerance indeed.
Meh. I once saw a man state that the Christians are right and that they (and only they) will go to heaven and witness perfection. He said this several times, in fact. And more than a hundred people, all congregated around him, continued taking him seriously without any difficulty at all.
The fact that bullshit "arguments" like this pass in religious settings is to be expected. The fact that they pass in political settings is to be lamented.
People that think this crap will fly with a technical audience are to be ridiculed, mercilessly, until they either get a clue or fade away.
DRM "functionality" in hardware? No thanks. You know, I remember an NVIDIA engineer complaining to me about how they'd had to do a bunch of really fucked up stuff to get the G80 GPUs to support HD playback on Vista. I'm pretty sure Intel's latest stuff has to deal with the same bullshit too. So really, the title of your post should read "Don't buy post-Vista GPUs". That kinda puts a damper on the whole 3D graphics thing, doesn't it?
Better advice would be, "Don't run your new GPU on an OS that forces it to enable the stupid DRM logic that the engineers really didn't want to build into it in the first place." Yeah, that's much better.
To put it a bit less sarcastically than the AC did, it's not what you said, it's how you said it.
This post is another example. Your first line is fine. You should have left it at that. Going on to insult the moderators was foolish, however. It only makes you look like you're here to pick a fight, and it makes others with mod points less likely to reevaluate your original post and fix the moderation if it is indeed wrong. The third line only reinforces that image.
Much as people like to whine about the/. groupthink (whatever), tolerance is not as great a problem on/. as you may think. I've made unpopular statements here several times and actually been modded up for it because I wrote them clearly and didn't resort to personal attacks, which makes for (+1) interesting conversation. Do the same.
And FYI,/. isn't crawling with Liberals, it's crawling with Libertarians. The difference is significant. The latter is actually closer to what "conservative Republican" (I see that in your/. profile) used to mean than it is to what Liberal is taken to mean today. Look it up.
I would submit that you DO NOT know how to stay on topic.
The actual manner in which a nation deals with its hardened criminals is not my concern so long as it keeps those who cannot be reformed the hell away from society at large, and punishes the rest according to their crime and no more. That's what I've said in several other posts. The failure to do so is what my obviously sarcastic post was talking about. My personal expertise in the dispensation of said justice is not relevant to this discussion.
What you know is how to make you feel better after the fact. Yes, actually, I do. Thank you. I wrote about it here. Relevant passage is quoted below.
But the legal system isn't responsible for helping me cope with my scars so I'll be damned if it should treat you any differently. That's what time, growing up, meditation, religious guidance (if you go in for that sort of thing), and therapy are for. Justice has a different purpose. Oh, wait. You were trying to imply that I want to twist the legal system into my own personal safety blanket, weren't you? Oh. Then I take back my thanks and tell you that you are wrong.
But the death penalty seems to have zero preventative value and only makes the people advocating it look pretty incompetent (and amoral). Death penalty, life imprisonment, life in a mental institution, whatever. I don't care. Dangerous persons shouldn't be dumped into society at large. What we actually do with them is another discussion, but I maintain that repeat child molestors or rapists should be treated no differently from serial killers. One way or another they need to be taken off the streets.
And again, I reiterate, those who act once out of passion or weakness should not be lumped in with the mentally deranged. Period. If they did great harm let them serve a greater sentence but let them actually serve it out. Turning them into sub-persons for so long as they shall live is wrong, both pragmatically and morally.
Which brings me to the rest of your post where you wandered off on a complete tangent whith the intention of, what, painting me as a hypocrytical right-wing religious nut? I'm not. Though that shouldn't even be in this discussion.
Please, find yourself somebody else on another thread with whom you can argue morality and Christian hypocracy, I'm more interested in common sense.
We can't lock them up for life, because we haven't quite stooped to the level of "PRE-CRIME". Oh yes we have. That's exactly the problem. Reasoning follows.
Yes, they will probably re-offend.. but that is still a probably, and as a free nation we're still required to give them that chance. Except that they're not being given a chance. They're released from prison but told they're not allowed to reintegrate with society. And before you tell me that they are given a chance you have a good long think about how you'd feel if a new neighbor moved in and introduced himself as someone who raped two little girls but swears that's all in the past. Tell me you wouldn't do whatever it took to make him leave. And, being the sort of person that writes in a calm and reasonable tone, think about what the rest of the nation (you know, the raving make-me-feel-safe-Mr.-Politician crowd will do to him.
It's not a chance. It's further punishment that's justified by what they might do. It's punishment for what they might do. It's pre-crime.
If your car gets stolen, or if you get punched in a bar you aren't likely to suffer post traumatic stress disorder like a rape victim would. The GP was comparing rape to generic violence. You're comparing it to mere property loss. If someone picks your lock and steals stuff that's just property loss. If someone puts a gun to your head and makes you load your own things into his vehicle that's a portion of your life where you were not in any way a free person and you will remember it till you die.
Violence is violence. It's abhorrent in any form. And any emotionally damaged person is statistically more likely to become unstalbe and commit some crime in the future, not just those that got raped.
I was being sarcastic. I hope you were also being sarcastic. And even if you were I'll pretend you weren't for the benefit of those inevitable few that assumed you were serious.
Pushing people below the poverty line is always going to be a bad thing. Poor people have little to lose and much to gain by turning to crime. Do we really want more homeless bums that get addicted to whatever they can find to ease the pain of their lives stealing their way to their next fix? More prostitutes spreading god knows what diseases around?
Even if they're genuinely good people that would never do such things even when all the world rejects them and goes out of its way to spite them, well, why would you ever want to exclude such an exceptionally good person from society when they clearly just made a mistake? Why would you want them draining charities and straining society as a whole when it would be enough to punish them for their error and let them get on with their lives?
How does any of this offer the criminal a chance to reform? How does it serve justice, which clearly stears away from cruel and unusual punishment? How does it serve society? It doesn't, in any way whatsoever.
My point was that the current system seems to be edging closer and closer to effectively sentencing an overly broad class of people to destitution which is, for the above-mentioned reasons, a very bad thing - no matter what the actual crime may have been. The fact that they lump people that made a mistake who probably won't do it again with the mentally ill only adds insult to the injury this does to the cause of justice.
Yes, this is all common sense, and very obvious. In fact, I would be the first to suggest that this post be modded -1 Redundant, except that society at large has somehow missed these blindingly obvious realities.
I appologize if this offends, but I can't think of a way to be more tactful without butchering what I mean to say.
The thing that bothers me is that I fully aggree with the first part of the judge's statement. The court is not responsible for you or your child. You are responsible for yourself and for your children. No, I don't know the story, and I don't want to. Yes, I've already thought of a dozen scenarios where there was nothing you could do to protect your child from this one sicko. But that is not the court's problem. That's between you and whoever was involved in exposing your daughter to that man.
A bad thing happened to your family, fine, I understand. Equally (IMHO) bad things have happened to my family too. But the legal system isn't responsible for helping me cope with my scars so I'll be damned if it should treat you any differently. That's what time, growing up, meditation, religious guidance (if you go in for that sort of thing), and therapy are for. Justice has a different purpose.
I don't have an answer either, beyond my gut instinct which is to simply lock them up until science figures out a way to actually demonstrably cure them. But I absolutely refuse to support a system that's more focused on security theater than justice. It revolts me. And that's before I think about what Joe Random deals with for the rest of his life just because he got a bit too drunk one night and took a piss where some poor old granny had to see it (right, like she's never dealt with a vulgar thing in her life), or the man that was killed because someone with a similar name was in the sex offenders registry (was on/. a while ago, too tired to dig up the link).
Talk to people, grow up or SOMETHING that will make you aware that people sometimes use hyperbole to illustrate a point and that not every statement should be taken literally.
Ridiculous. If they've paid their debt to society and are deemed reformed they should be treated like any other type of criminal. If they're considered a danger to society they should be locked up for life or simply shot. Creating a class of almost-persons is, IMHO, well within the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
...of serving your time and paying your debt to society?
At this rate we may as well just cut to the chace and sentence convicted sex offenders (and whoever else is out to get your children) to lifelong destitution. We can brand them or something so people know to hate and fear them because, really, they can't possibly have reformed...and it would save neighbors and employers the bother of looking them up in the registries (heaven forbid people actually do something about their own security).
TFA implies this only affects the worst of the worst. Let's at least hope that's accurate.
Meh. If they don't then the gaming industry will eventually notice that there are already a number of OpenGL extensions out that give access to DX10 level features on XP, Linux, and OS X.
Ballmers new password: dsdsdsdsds Nah. More like "D!D!D!D!D!". With all those upper case D's and exclamation marks, his password isn't just loud, it's also more secure!
Nah. Not "usually". GPUs are correct...for a given value of correct, that is. I mean, have you seen the massive error bars the DX/GL specs attach to the meaning of "correct" or "conformant"? Kind of hard to miss that mark when your target is the size of a large barn and you get to shoot from a point of your choosing - including the inside.
I swear, an implementation based on a five year old with a red, green, and blue crayon would probably satisfy a good portion of the GL spec...
Not to be needlessly glib about it, but...
Brown skin: + 10pts Named "Mohamed" or something close: +20pts Last name starts in "Al...": +5 pts Has a beard: + 10pts Being the British minister for international development: +100 pts/anti-terrorism summit
LETS INVADE!! People often wonder why Canadians put up with Celine Dion. Well folks, this is the answer, right here. Because, you see, the songs you've heard are actually only a tiny fraction of a miniscule portion of the echo of her voice's true potential.
If anyone ever invades we'll turn her up to full power. Nothing would survive (except, perhaps, Celine herself, and cockroaches, and those tube worms that grow at the bottom of the ocean). So next time you foreigners think of invading, just imagine the horror and the agony of dying to the theme to Titanic...
Also she knows the brown note, but that's more of a tactical use whereas I'm talking about strategic deployment.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because Halo 2 doesn't actually need directx10. It has a 'is this vista check', and it might use a couple of minor new directx 10 direct3d calls (which can easily be captured and reimplemented in direct3d 9).
Correct. A lot of the rest, well, not so much. And I appologize in advance for tearing into you over this, but I do 3D graphics programming for a living and it just pisses me off to no end how MS's marketing statements have somehow morphed into technical truths when they are clearly not true at all.
In a nut shell, DX10's rendering features can be (and are, under OpenGL) implemented under the old driver model. Vista's shiny 3D desktop and ridiculous DRM (which are separate from Direct3D 10), however, cannot. Microsoft consistently choses to confuse the two, but they are distinct technologies that shouldn't probably don't rely on each other to any significant degree. Details follow.
The real features of directX10 like Video memory virtualization and gpu multitasking (which allows Vista to have multiple direct3d accelerated applications (including the desktop) all running at the same time in (possibibly overlapping windows).
This is all possible on XP with both OpenGL and Direct3D 9. Seriously, get a couple of 3D programs that run in windowed mode and drag them around your monitor. Overlap them. It works fine on XP. Managing the GPU resources is simply done inside the driver. All Vista's model does is move some functionality that used to be common to all drivers up into the kernel, because refactoring things this way allowed them to remove some of the overhead from most D3D API entry points - overhead that exists in D3D 9 (which is obviously not crippled or useless because of it).
The D3D10 feature set could be implemented in XP without rewriting the kernel. There might be more overhead when calling rendering functions, but it probably wouldn't be worse than calling D3D9 functions (and D3D9's API is a lot chattier than D3D10's). There is no D3D10 feature that requires the Vista kernel rewrite.
If you don't believe me then go put a GeForce 8 series card in a XP machine, install the latest driver, and then download GLEW. Get it to dump out a list of available OpenGL extensions (visualinfo.exe in the bin directory, assuming you downloaded the Win32 binaries). Note these extensions in particular: GL_EXT_geometry_shader4, GL_EXT_texture_array, GL_NV_transform_feedback, as well as a few others I don't care to list. Those are all the OpenGL equivalents to the new D3D10 feature set. If NVIDIA can expose D3D10 generation features through OpenGL on an XP driver running on the old XP kernel, Microsoft can do the same thing through Direct3D 10. They simply choose not to.
The only thing the old driver model can't actually do is share graphics resources among multiple processes, something that pretty much no 3D graphics application would ever really do in the first place (because launching processes and getting them to talk to each other is really expensive on Windows), and something which is not required for useful D3D 10 support. Read on to find out why they stuck in a useless feature.
You aren't going to get a proper Compiz or Aqua class desktop for XP because XP simply can't do this stuff. Vista/DirectX10 can.
The shiny 3D desktop thing in Vista is the only thing that really requires the new driver model, as it is what actually makes use of the ability to share D3D resources among multiple processes (it basically shares any 3D app's render surface into its own texture set). And note that the shiny desktop doesn't even use D3D10. It just uses D3D9 plus the extensions to D3D9 that are only available under the new driver model - extensions which only serve to notify applications that their device will (almost) never be lost (mundane window/D3D device setup thing, has nothing to do with actually rendering) and expose th
Yet obviously this country has already spent a lot of time under a gold standard, and it's very easy to verify that during this time inflation was about the same as it is now or slightly worse, and the boom-and-bust cycle was considerably worse. It's really easy to google for graphs of these things, it's not some obscure data.
Yes, and most of that data is from the last century and doesn't account for things like the current level of industrialization, advances in medicine, overall exucation, etc, etc. I mean, really, if we're gonna whip out the charts then why don't we talk about the bust that hit around the 1930's, you know, the only one that the average person knows by name? It happened very shortly after the current system was introduced...
Too many variables have changed over the last hundred years for any such analysis to be even remotely scientific.
If you want to argue that commodity backed money is bad, try this: commodity values are severely dependent on political and economic structures that extend far beyond any one nation's control. That's why I'd be against a gold standard, and it's a much more rational way to argue than comparing pre and post Fed economic charts when almost everything else has also changed.
When the government spends more than it takes in, the treasury department sells bonds.
Wikipedia says (emphasis mind):
When the expenses of the U.S. Government exceed the revenue collected, it issues new debt to cover the deficit. This debt typically takes the form of new issues of government bonds which are sold on the open market. However, the debt can also be monetized by which the Federal Reserve creates an entry on its books to credit the US Government for an amount equal to the dollar amount of the bonds the Federal Reserve is acquiring. The money created in this process not only includes the new dollars that came into existence just to purchase the bonds, but much more because this new money is now sitting in the form of checkbook money at the Federal Reserve. Under the scheme of Fractional Reserve Banking this new checkbook money is treated as an asset to lend against. Economists estimate the expansion of the money supply as being many times the amount of the initial money created with the exact amount being a function of what percentage of deposits banks must set aside as "reserves".
Even if that's overblown, you still have this to deal with (from the same article):
A traditional defense of the national debt is that we "owe the debt to ourselves", but that is increasingly not true. The US debt in the hands of foreign governments is 25% of the total, virtually double the 1988 figure of 13%. Despite the declining willingness of foreign investors to continue investing in dollar denominated instruments as the US Dollar has fallen in 2007, the U.S. Treasury statistics indicate that, at the end of 2006, foreigners held 44% of federal debt held by the public. About 66% of that 44% was held by the central banks of other countries, in particular the central banks of Japan and China.
How, exactly, does selling treasury bonds to foreigners (like, say, the Chinese) offset the new dollars circulating in the US economy? I mean, yes, you could say "well, they would have otherwise spent that money into our economy", but you don't know that for sure. And anyway, that's exactly what selling them the bond does, as it allows the government to create and use more money, which is then amplified by the fractional reserve banking system. That money won't be removed from the system until much later, and at that time it's likely to be repaid by simply issuing bonds elsewhere.
Yes, the gold standard is the wrong answer. So is unfettered and irresponsible government spending. And it's just stupid to ignore the fact that this causes inflation which does hurt everyone but the military and the
Not to run against the whole "this could mean only one thing" meme, but I think it's just as likely that some old hardware sitting at the ends of that cable got stressed past its breaking point because having the other links down finally pushed it past its limits.
The parent said "How can anyone be taken seriously after such a remark?" I answered that question with a legitimate case where people are taken seriously after making far more extreme statements. I hope you didn't confuse a mildly sarcastic tone with, well, all the things you wrote.
The rest of my post attacks the use of emotion-based statements, as a substitute for arguments, in what should be logic-based debates. If you think I'm wrong and that tangential, irrational, and overly-emotional attacks do belong in political and technical discourse then say so clearly and back it up with some reasoning.
Bah, who am I kidding, you're just here to call me names. Tolerance indeed.
Meh. I once saw a man state that the Christians are right and that they (and only they) will go to heaven and witness perfection. He said this several times, in fact. And more than a hundred people, all congregated around him, continued taking him seriously without any difficulty at all.
The fact that bullshit "arguments" like this pass in religious settings is to be expected. The fact that they pass in political settings is to be lamented.
People that think this crap will fly with a technical audience are to be ridiculed, mercilessly, until they either get a clue or fade away.
I LOL'd. Yeah. First thing I thought when I read that is, "You must be new here..."
Better advice would be, "Don't run your new GPU on an OS that forces it to enable the stupid DRM logic that the engineers really didn't want to build into it in the first place." Yeah, that's much better.
To put it a bit less sarcastically than the AC did, it's not what you said, it's how you said it.
/. groupthink (whatever), tolerance is not as great a problem on /. as you may think. I've made unpopular statements here several times and actually been modded up for it because I wrote them clearly and didn't resort to personal attacks, which makes for (+1) interesting conversation. Do the same.
/. isn't crawling with Liberals, it's crawling with Libertarians. The difference is significant. The latter is actually closer to what "conservative Republican" (I see that in your /. profile) used to mean than it is to what Liberal is taken to mean today. Look it up.
This post is another example. Your first line is fine. You should have left it at that. Going on to insult the moderators was foolish, however. It only makes you look like you're here to pick a fight, and it makes others with mod points less likely to reevaluate your original post and fix the moderation if it is indeed wrong. The third line only reinforces that image.
Much as people like to whine about the
And FYI,
Oh. Wait. No...
The actual manner in which a nation deals with its hardened criminals is not my concern so long as it keeps those who cannot be reformed the hell away from society at large, and punishes the rest according to their crime and no more. That's what I've said in several other posts. The failure to do so is what my obviously sarcastic post was talking about. My personal expertise in the dispensation of said justice is not relevant to this discussion. What you know is how to make you feel better after the fact. Yes, actually, I do. Thank you. I wrote about it here. Relevant passage is quoted below. But the legal system isn't responsible for helping me cope with my scars so I'll be damned if it should treat you any differently. That's what time, growing up, meditation, religious guidance (if you go in for that sort of thing), and therapy are for. Justice has a different purpose. Oh, wait. You were trying to imply that I want to twist the legal system into my own personal safety blanket, weren't you? Oh. Then I take back my thanks and tell you that you are wrong. But the death penalty seems to have zero preventative value and only makes the people advocating it look pretty incompetent (and amoral). Death penalty, life imprisonment, life in a mental institution, whatever. I don't care. Dangerous persons shouldn't be dumped into society at large. What we actually do with them is another discussion, but I maintain that repeat child molestors or rapists should be treated no differently from serial killers. One way or another they need to be taken off the streets.
And again, I reiterate, those who act once out of passion or weakness should not be lumped in with the mentally deranged. Period. If they did great harm let them serve a greater sentence but let them actually serve it out. Turning them into sub-persons for so long as they shall live is wrong, both pragmatically and morally.
Which brings me to the rest of your post where you wandered off on a complete tangent whith the intention of, what, painting me as a hypocrytical right-wing religious nut? I'm not. Though that shouldn't even be in this discussion.
Please, find yourself somebody else on another thread with whom you can argue morality and Christian hypocracy, I'm more interested in common sense.
It's not a chance. It's further punishment that's justified by what they might do. It's punishment for what they might do. It's pre-crime. If your car gets stolen, or if you get punched in a bar you aren't likely to suffer post traumatic stress disorder like a rape victim would. The GP was comparing rape to generic violence. You're comparing it to mere property loss. If someone picks your lock and steals stuff that's just property loss. If someone puts a gun to your head and makes you load your own things into his vehicle that's a portion of your life where you were not in any way a free person and you will remember it till you die.
Violence is violence. It's abhorrent in any form. And any emotionally damaged person is statistically more likely to become unstalbe and commit some crime in the future, not just those that got raped.
I was being sarcastic. I hope you were also being sarcastic. And even if you were I'll pretend you weren't for the benefit of those inevitable few that assumed you were serious.
Pushing people below the poverty line is always going to be a bad thing. Poor people have little to lose and much to gain by turning to crime. Do we really want more homeless bums that get addicted to whatever they can find to ease the pain of their lives stealing their way to their next fix? More prostitutes spreading god knows what diseases around?
Even if they're genuinely good people that would never do such things even when all the world rejects them and goes out of its way to spite them, well, why would you ever want to exclude such an exceptionally good person from society when they clearly just made a mistake? Why would you want them draining charities and straining society as a whole when it would be enough to punish them for their error and let them get on with their lives?
How does any of this offer the criminal a chance to reform? How does it serve justice, which clearly stears away from cruel and unusual punishment? How does it serve society? It doesn't, in any way whatsoever.
My point was that the current system seems to be edging closer and closer to effectively sentencing an overly broad class of people to destitution which is, for the above-mentioned reasons, a very bad thing - no matter what the actual crime may have been. The fact that they lump people that made a mistake who probably won't do it again with the mentally ill only adds insult to the injury this does to the cause of justice.
Yes, this is all common sense, and very obvious. In fact, I would be the first to suggest that this post be modded -1 Redundant, except that society at large has somehow missed these blindingly obvious realities.
Exactly. What makes compulsive paedophiles different from compulsive murderers? We know how to deal with the latter. Why is this even an issue?
I appologize if this offends, but I can't think of a way to be more tactful without butchering what I mean to say.
/. a while ago, too tired to dig up the link).
The thing that bothers me is that I fully aggree with the first part of the judge's statement. The court is not responsible for you or your child. You are responsible for yourself and for your children. No, I don't know the story, and I don't want to. Yes, I've already thought of a dozen scenarios where there was nothing you could do to protect your child from this one sicko. But that is not the court's problem. That's between you and whoever was involved in exposing your daughter to that man.
A bad thing happened to your family, fine, I understand. Equally (IMHO) bad things have happened to my family too. But the legal system isn't responsible for helping me cope with my scars so I'll be damned if it should treat you any differently. That's what time, growing up, meditation, religious guidance (if you go in for that sort of thing), and therapy are for. Justice has a different purpose.
I don't have an answer either, beyond my gut instinct which is to simply lock them up until science figures out a way to actually demonstrably cure them. But I absolutely refuse to support a system that's more focused on security theater than justice. It revolts me. And that's before I think about what Joe Random deals with for the rest of his life just because he got a bit too drunk one night and took a piss where some poor old granny had to see it (right, like she's never dealt with a vulgar thing in her life), or the man that was killed because someone with a similar name was in the sex offenders registry (was on
Talk to people, grow up or SOMETHING that will make you aware that people sometimes use hyperbole to illustrate a point and that not every statement should be taken literally.
Ridiculous. If they've paid their debt to society and are deemed reformed they should be treated like any other type of criminal. If they're considered a danger to society they should be locked up for life or simply shot. Creating a class of almost-persons is, IMHO, well within the definition of cruel and unusual punishment.
...of serving your time and paying your debt to society?
At this rate we may as well just cut to the chace and sentence convicted sex offenders (and whoever else is out to get your children) to lifelong destitution. We can brand them or something so people know to hate and fear them because, really, they can't possibly have reformed...and it would save neighbors and employers the bother of looking them up in the registries (heaven forbid people actually do something about their own security).
TFA implies this only affects the worst of the worst. Let's at least hope that's accurate.
Meh. If they don't then the gaming industry will eventually notice that there are already a number of OpenGL extensions out that give access to DX10 level features on XP, Linux, and OS X.
Nah. Not "usually". GPUs are correct...for a given value of correct, that is. I mean, have you seen the massive error bars the DX/GL specs attach to the meaning of "correct" or "conformant"? Kind of hard to miss that mark when your target is the size of a large barn and you get to shoot from a point of your choosing - including the inside.
I swear, an implementation based on a five year old with a red, green, and blue crayon would probably satisfy a good portion of the GL spec...
</hyperbole>
Named "Mohamed" or something close: +20pts
Last name starts in "Al...": +5 pts
Has a beard: + 10pts Being the British minister for international development: +100 pts/anti-terrorism summit
If anyone ever invades we'll turn her up to full power. Nothing would survive (except, perhaps, Celine herself, and cockroaches, and those tube worms that grow at the bottom of the ocean). So next time you foreigners think of invading, just imagine the horror and the agony of dying to the theme to Titanic...
Also she knows the brown note, but that's more of a tactical use whereas I'm talking about strategic deployment.
I think he meant "U.S. adds the S.R. onto its name", turning it into...well, I'm sure you can figure it out.