Imagine the army, or the navy, organized like NASA is. We'd have 500 soldiers, 500 doctors, 1000 accountants, 1500 medics, 20,000 officer (with at least 1000 flag officers) and 500 hopeful politicians. Not to mention about 50 infiltrators from the competition. Oh, I forgot the 200 embedded journalists.
If war was run like space exploration, this would be an excellent point.
Mandatory safety standards will need to be codified whether the effort is undertaken by NASA or private enterprise. This is more or less a "put your money where your mouth is" test for Congress; they will have a hard time justifying tougher standards than they themselves were willing to pay for, after all.
I think your expectations are unreasonable. Games aren't measured against an objective constant, they're scored relative to the competition. People compare scores from different years and think they're getting an absolute statement on quality but that premise is flawed. If you don't change the genre, then a 65 in 2009 may very well be a superior game to the 95 in 2005, assuming that genre made a lot of progress in the intervening years.
Example: EverQuest released in 1999 and scored 8s and 9s (it has an 85 on metacritic). Warhammer Online released in 2006 and got almost identical scores (86 on metacritic.) Yet Warhammer is plainly superior in technology, gameplay, balance, and story compared to the original EQ. The scores are similar not because the quality of the games is the same, but because Warhammer Online was being compared to World of Warcraft (93) instead of Ultima Online (59.) And Ultima Online, despite its mediocre score, was easily the best game of its kind when it released.
Scores have context. If you remove it, you're not making a direct comparison.
I've never understood why this is bad. Does the existence of a Pokemon article somehow lessen the legitimacy of an article about the Battle of the Bulge? Storage of the information is surely not a problem. If that's what people want to contribute, then maybe that's what people will want to look up. Isn't it more important to have people in the community who participate than having them contributing elsewhere? Seriously, other than the obvious fact that you personally aren't interested in insert obscure niche here, what's the problem?
I've also never seen a very good argument for why Star Trek is more relevant than anything else. Is there a base number of fans required? But there are pretty obscure bands, and most fans hate the Star Trek movies but they are all listed. The distinction just seems arbitrary.
In matters of custom, the more universally recognized method is the right one.
Everyone knows what 1,054.65 means. Some people do not know what the hell 12,56 is supposed to be. Since confusion in financial transactions is good for nobody at all, the correct custom is in fact the former. If you want to implement a new worldwide custom then that's fine but I suspect you will need a very good justification and not simply the desire to do something new.
Yes and they are deterred; that's why they have other people do the crimes and we have to prosecute them on things like tax evasion.
Deterrence by definition can only work on reasonable people. Unfortunately, most people are not being reasonable when they're committing serious crimes. Your mafia examples are being reasonable, and deterrence works on them. Their underlings who actually commit the crimes are working out of fear or unquestioning loyalty, neither of which is very conducive to making informed decisions, and so deterrence is nearly useless against them.
That means that failure to keep the guilty and dangerous locked up means you are complacent in the death/harm of an innocent just as if you locked up an innocent to begin with.
I think that's a slippery slope.
Define "dangerous." How can you hold this view and not favor eugenics and administering psychological tests to all citizens and pre-emptively imprisoning those who "fail"? After all, if the means were there to prevent a crime and you did nothing, are you not complicit?
I'd much rather live in a society where having free will also meant personal responsibility. A society that blames me because you made a bad decision, even in the case where I was pretty sure you were a bad decision maker, is a society that has actually lost the idea of personal freedom altogether in my opinion.
I think zero tolerance is the worst possible message to send to kids. For any infraction only the most severe penalty is considered. No thought, just the simplest and easiest system possible. The subtext is that the use of power is its own justification, and that the kids aren't worth any effort whatsoever. Bringing a gun to school and shooting a classmate over a minor disagreement is now legitimized, because it's the exact same mindset the principal is using.
The same could be said about life without parole. What matters is that they reached the endpoint of what the law can do. Having an extra high-end punishment should actually help in that regard. Or at least it would if such extreme criminals were using logic at the time.
Example: a level 5 crime gets you life without parole, a level 7 crime warrants capital punishment. If someone commits a level 6 crime then without the death penalty they'd might as well go to level 10, whereas with the death penalty it'd be in their best interest to leave it at 6.
But under your system, a 5 might as well go to 6 and a 7 might as well go to 10. I don't see how you're solving your problem at all, it has the exact same issue. I also don't see how it's even logical to have level 10 crimes when 7 is the death penalty. The death penalty should be the end of the scale, what's the point of having a hierarchy of crimes that all get the same punishment?
I also think that assuming that criminals use some sort of risk/reward calculation is naive. The punishment for most crimes is already harsher than it logically should be in a vacuum; you can get a year in jail for stealing $500! But people are in jail for doing just that... the only people deterred by prison are deterred by the existence of prison; details of the punishment are irrelevant to them.
If I were broke, I would steal $500 from you if there was no punishment and I believed that you would not be unduly harmed from the loss. However, as it turns out I would much rather go without $500 than go to jail. Once the sentence for jail passes an insignificant amount of time (I don't know what this is, but let's say two weeks, enough time for most people to have earned the $500 legitimately) then you've already deterred anyone bothering to make the calculation. After that, the people in jail were stupid/unthinking/desperate enough that the calculation simply wasn't performed, and your deterrence factor from that point is insignificant. By the time you reach crimes deserving the death penalty, I would imagine that these people or their situations are almost always broken beyond reason. I don't think very many criminals think to themselves, "twenty years is totally worth gutting this guy right now," but would back off if it would mean the death penalty. At some point, you're going to do what you're going to do, consequences be damned, and I imagine (and hope) that the most heinous crimes are almost all committed with that mindset.
Not sure I'd put kidnapping and rape quite on the same level as murder, but I think most people against the death penalty do not disagree with you; at least, I am against the death penalty and I do not disagree with the core of your statement. The problem isn't that people think murder isn't worth execution - after all, what could be more fair? The problem is that you can't guarantee me that the people you are executing were actually guilty. Our system is (perhaps necessarily) flawed. If you are convicting innocent people then the death penalty becomes a lottery.
This thread suggests that volunteering to be killed might have little to do with actual guilt; at least two posters said they'd rather die even if they were innocent. I am not sure that a mechanism that allows an innocent man to give in to despair is a very good one to have.
Well historically pissed-off students get shot and run over by tanks. Pissed-off religious groups gruesomely kill their enemies in operations ranging from single-man strikes to multinational wars. Which group do you want to take on?
Really? Taking care of roads is okay but taking care of people is not? How is it that a government by the people, for the people, and of the people has no responsibility to the people? I think most people who object to universal health care do so because it's not the way things have always been done, and not because it's illogical or inconsistent with our values. If we could take universal health care for granted because it had been around since 1780, nobody would question its value. Can you provide a reasoned explanation for why this is bad? I haven't seen a good objection, by which I mean one that doesn't rely on an appeal to emotion, scare tactics, or making the issue completely personal.
I think it is just as likely that it's a political ploy and he doesn't really care whether it passes. He's created an us-vs-them scenario that should resonate with residents whether it works or not.
The human herd could do with some culling of the credulous.
Like all the otherwise intelligent people in this very thread so willing to believe that everyone else this stupid, you mean?
We receive one anecdote and suddenly all of society is on the brink of terminal stupidity. How is that discerning and not credulous?
Because there's no real difference between modding yourself up, and replying to something you disagree with while also modding it down. I think the idea is that if you are involved in the discussion you're no longer going to be objectively assessing how to mod.
I've never been in the military but I would guess that when a system stops being effective a soldier stops using that system or modifies it so that it is effective. You're right, but it's also true that new things are nearly always greeted with skepticism by the rank and file, you have to pound them over the head to get them to use something very new unless they can see that the old ways aren't working. A great deal of military training is repetition. If you train for a situation enough, then when a similar situation actually occurs you are less likely to panic and more likely to take the appropriate action (or at least the action you have been told is appropriate.)
When the leaders introduce something new, it seems like an arbitrary break from past training. Soldiers are taught with an emphasis on flexibility, but it's a flexibility for the situation and the enemy's reactions; NOT for their side! Given input A a soldier absolutely expects and demands that the men around him produce response B, just as he expects and demands that of himself. If you start changing basic tactics, even for the better, there is a period of discomfort and uncertainty. Tell a soldier a hundred times that gunfire means dive for cover, locate the enemy, and assault if possible. Run exercises so he can see that this is effective. He buys into it completely. Then one day, explain that what would really help him is to dive for cover and make a note about it on this neat device before he goes running off. You may be correct and it may be better but he's not going to like the sound of it; shouldn't he be doing what works? Who the hell are you, anyway? Probably have stock in this stupid company. Oops we lost it, sorry Gunny.
So you have to strike a balance between listening to the troops and making sure they gave it a fair shake.
This usually works best in small units where trust in each other is very high, allowing greater confidence in themselves as a unit and so are more open to trying new things. This is why special forces usually get to try the new stuff first.
ON that same day his wife will mentally smack him in the head and say," Change the channel with your mind you idiot. And turn that down." "...and didn't I ask you to think out the trash?"
In "The Stars My Destination," by Alfred Bester, when someone "jaunts" (teleports) it makes an audible popping noise as air rushes in to fill the new space. He didn't talk about the effect on the body on the other end though.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine the army, or the navy, organized like NASA is. We'd have 500 soldiers, 500 doctors, 1000 accountants, 1500 medics, 20,000 officer (with at least 1000 flag officers) and 500 hopeful politicians. Not to mention about 50 infiltrators from the competition. Oh, I forgot the 200 embedded journalists.
If war was run like space exploration, this would be an excellent point.
Mandatory safety standards will need to be codified whether the effort is undertaken by NASA or private enterprise. This is more or less a "put your money where your mouth is" test for Congress; they will have a hard time justifying tougher standards than they themselves were willing to pay for, after all.
I think your expectations are unreasonable. Games aren't measured against an objective constant, they're scored relative to the competition. People compare scores from different years and think they're getting an absolute statement on quality but that premise is flawed. If you don't change the genre, then a 65 in 2009 may very well be a superior game to the 95 in 2005, assuming that genre made a lot of progress in the intervening years.
Example: EverQuest released in 1999 and scored 8s and 9s (it has an 85 on metacritic). Warhammer Online released in 2006 and got almost identical scores (86 on metacritic.) Yet Warhammer is plainly superior in technology, gameplay, balance, and story compared to the original EQ. The scores are similar not because the quality of the games is the same, but because Warhammer Online was being compared to World of Warcraft (93) instead of Ultima Online (59.) And Ultima Online, despite its mediocre score, was easily the best game of its kind when it released.
Scores have context. If you remove it, you're not making a direct comparison.
I've never understood why this is bad. Does the existence of a Pokemon article somehow lessen the legitimacy of an article about the Battle of the Bulge? Storage of the information is surely not a problem. If that's what people want to contribute, then maybe that's what people will want to look up. Isn't it more important to have people in the community who participate than having them contributing elsewhere? Seriously, other than the obvious fact that you personally aren't interested in insert obscure niche here, what's the problem?
I've also never seen a very good argument for why Star Trek is more relevant than anything else. Is there a base number of fans required? But there are pretty obscure bands, and most fans hate the Star Trek movies but they are all listed. The distinction just seems arbitrary.
In matters of custom, the more universally recognized method is the right one. Everyone knows what 1,054.65 means. Some people do not know what the hell 12,56 is supposed to be. Since confusion in financial transactions is good for nobody at all, the correct custom is in fact the former. If you want to implement a new worldwide custom then that's fine but I suspect you will need a very good justification and not simply the desire to do something new.
Yes and they are deterred; that's why they have other people do the crimes and we have to prosecute them on things like tax evasion.
Deterrence by definition can only work on reasonable people. Unfortunately, most people are not being reasonable when they're committing serious crimes. Your mafia examples are being reasonable, and deterrence works on them. Their underlings who actually commit the crimes are working out of fear or unquestioning loyalty, neither of which is very conducive to making informed decisions, and so deterrence is nearly useless against them.
That means that failure to keep the guilty and dangerous locked up means you are complacent in the death/harm of an innocent just as if you locked up an innocent to begin with.
I think that's a slippery slope.
Define "dangerous." How can you hold this view and not favor eugenics and administering psychological tests to all citizens and pre-emptively imprisoning those who "fail"? After all, if the means were there to prevent a crime and you did nothing, are you not complicit?
I'd much rather live in a society where having free will also meant personal responsibility. A society that blames me because you made a bad decision, even in the case where I was pretty sure you were a bad decision maker, is a society that has actually lost the idea of personal freedom altogether in my opinion.
I think zero tolerance is the worst possible message to send to kids. For any infraction only the most severe penalty is considered. No thought, just the simplest and easiest system possible. The subtext is that the use of power is its own justification, and that the kids aren't worth any effort whatsoever. Bringing a gun to school and shooting a classmate over a minor disagreement is now legitimized, because it's the exact same mindset the principal is using.
The same could be said about life without parole. What matters is that they reached the endpoint of what the law can do. Having an extra high-end punishment should actually help in that regard. Or at least it would if such extreme criminals were using logic at the time. Example: a level 5 crime gets you life without parole, a level 7 crime warrants capital punishment. If someone commits a level 6 crime then without the death penalty they'd might as well go to level 10, whereas with the death penalty it'd be in their best interest to leave it at 6.
But under your system, a 5 might as well go to 6 and a 7 might as well go to 10. I don't see how you're solving your problem at all, it has the exact same issue. I also don't see how it's even logical to have level 10 crimes when 7 is the death penalty. The death penalty should be the end of the scale, what's the point of having a hierarchy of crimes that all get the same punishment?
I also think that assuming that criminals use some sort of risk/reward calculation is naive. The punishment for most crimes is already harsher than it logically should be in a vacuum; you can get a year in jail for stealing $500! But people are in jail for doing just that... the only people deterred by prison are deterred by the existence of prison; details of the punishment are irrelevant to them.
If I were broke, I would steal $500 from you if there was no punishment and I believed that you would not be unduly harmed from the loss. However, as it turns out I would much rather go without $500 than go to jail. Once the sentence for jail passes an insignificant amount of time (I don't know what this is, but let's say two weeks, enough time for most people to have earned the $500 legitimately) then you've already deterred anyone bothering to make the calculation. After that, the people in jail were stupid/unthinking/desperate enough that the calculation simply wasn't performed, and your deterrence factor from that point is insignificant. By the time you reach crimes deserving the death penalty, I would imagine that these people or their situations are almost always broken beyond reason. I don't think very many criminals think to themselves, "twenty years is totally worth gutting this guy right now," but would back off if it would mean the death penalty. At some point, you're going to do what you're going to do, consequences be damned, and I imagine (and hope) that the most heinous crimes are almost all committed with that mindset.
Not sure I'd put kidnapping and rape quite on the same level as murder, but I think most people against the death penalty do not disagree with you; at least, I am against the death penalty and I do not disagree with the core of your statement. The problem isn't that people think murder isn't worth execution - after all, what could be more fair? The problem is that you can't guarantee me that the people you are executing were actually guilty. Our system is (perhaps necessarily) flawed. If you are convicting innocent people then the death penalty becomes a lottery.
This thread suggests that volunteering to be killed might have little to do with actual guilt; at least two posters said they'd rather die even if they were innocent. I am not sure that a mechanism that allows an innocent man to give in to despair is a very good one to have.
Really, are 3,000 teenage girls too much for the police to handle?
I honestly and sincerely hope so.
Well historically pissed-off students get shot and run over by tanks. Pissed-off religious groups gruesomely kill their enemies in operations ranging from single-man strikes to multinational wars. Which group do you want to take on?
Your sarcasm meter is working perfectly.
Really? Taking care of roads is okay but taking care of people is not? How is it that a government by the people, for the people, and of the people has no responsibility to the people? I think most people who object to universal health care do so because it's not the way things have always been done, and not because it's illogical or inconsistent with our values. If we could take universal health care for granted because it had been around since 1780, nobody would question its value. Can you provide a reasoned explanation for why this is bad? I haven't seen a good objection, by which I mean one that doesn't rely on an appeal to emotion, scare tactics, or making the issue completely personal.
I think people are more concerned with the precedent than the details.
I think it is just as likely that it's a political ploy and he doesn't really care whether it passes. He's created an us-vs-them scenario that should resonate with residents whether it works or not.
The human herd could do with some culling of the credulous.
Like all the otherwise intelligent people in this very thread so willing to believe that everyone else this stupid, you mean? We receive one anecdote and suddenly all of society is on the brink of terminal stupidity. How is that discerning and not credulous?
Because there's no real difference between modding yourself up, and replying to something you disagree with while also modding it down. I think the idea is that if you are involved in the discussion you're no longer going to be objectively assessing how to mod.
So you're saying the system is vulnerable to social engineering. Great.
What systems are not?
When the leaders introduce something new, it seems like an arbitrary break from past training. Soldiers are taught with an emphasis on flexibility, but it's a flexibility for the situation and the enemy's reactions; NOT for their side! Given input A a soldier absolutely expects and demands that the men around him produce response B, just as he expects and demands that of himself. If you start changing basic tactics, even for the better, there is a period of discomfort and uncertainty. Tell a soldier a hundred times that gunfire means dive for cover, locate the enemy, and assault if possible. Run exercises so he can see that this is effective. He buys into it completely. Then one day, explain that what would really help him is to dive for cover and make a note about it on this neat device before he goes running off. You may be correct and it may be better but he's not going to like the sound of it; shouldn't he be doing what works? Who the hell are you, anyway? Probably have stock in this stupid company. Oops we lost it, sorry Gunny.
So you have to strike a balance between listening to the troops and making sure they gave it a fair shake.
This usually works best in small units where trust in each other is very high, allowing greater confidence in themselves as a unit and so are more open to trying new things. This is why special forces usually get to try the new stuff first.
TSA2: Why'd you let him through?
TSA: Dude, he was quoting Star Wars, and with a straight face! Obviously harmless.
Suppose you have to "carry the one", but the malloc() fails? Where do you store the carry bit then?
Well... this one goes to eleven.Meetings are boring.
In "The Stars My Destination," by Alfred Bester, when someone "jaunts" (teleports) it makes an audible popping noise as air rushes in to fill the new space. He didn't talk about the effect on the body on the other end though.