There is evidence to show that the scarlet letter of sex offender status does more harm than good as it makes it harder for them to integrate into the community and makes them the target of vigilantism. And rules like these 'exclusion zones' make it even more difficult.
OTOH, there is a lot of evidence to show that psychological treatments programs are amazingly helpful.
We treat them differently because as a society we do not want to think about this sort of crime at all. We don't want to understand it. It's scary and frightening and we would prefer to class those who commit these sorts of crimes as monsters than trying to understand why and what might be broken that would cause these sorts of things to happen.
I also have a theory that every generation has a way of trying to class a group of males as totally unfit. Men and women are born in approximately equal numbers, but in fact we are somewhat polygynous in our actual behavior. This requires getting a large number of males either killed, or out of the dating pool.
That last theory I realize is highly speculative and somewhat trollish.:-)
That is a common misconception. In fact, the recidivism rate among people convicted of child molestation is lower than for any other kind of criminal. It is true that there is a core population of child molesters who are incurable recidivists, but that represents less than 10% of the total, and I think less than 5%. Look up real statistics from actual research on criminal behavior and don't rely on the stories fed to you by the media.
It annoys me how we decide to treat animals based on what we think goes on in their brains. We constantly discuss how big our brains are, or whale brains, dolphin brains, etc. We appear to judge person-hood purely on a judgement of brain activity. Yet we fail to support that in reality.
What really determines personhood in how we treat animals is if they fit into our social network, if they could fit into someone's 'monkeysphere'. That's why I'm saying that our conversations with dolphins or other animals should determine whether or not we can treat them as persons.
I think we should have standards for how we treat them, but I think that comparing the situation to slavery is somewhat over-the-top. Though it's really hard to think of some objective way of deciding just what rights they should have.
I think, maybe, we should just ask, if we can figure out how. Of course, then there's the morass of objectively identifying and interpreting communication.:-)
Holy logic fail Batman! Did you think about that enthymeme before you wrote it? If people are right because they are lazy, then people should be lazy so they can be right. You're trying so hard to push an irrational criticism that you have transformed a vice into a virtue.
I don't disagree, and I guess if you value being right as the best possible thing, that would be the logical conclusion. And that's not a thing I have a problem with.
*chuckle* No, it doesn't. If I were actually running an ISP, I wouldn't have a traffic management policy that looked anything even remotely like that.
In some sense, in the house-to-house network, everybody would be running their own ISP... Net neutrality rules are more to protect small people from the big players. But that's an interesting question. I have very mixed feelings about net neutrality.
My wireless is open, sort of. I've been wanting a really good traffic management system so people couldn't eat all of the bandwidth if I wanted it for something. The stuff Linux currently has is really complex and poorly documented. Additionally, I don't think it can do what I want.
I have a protocol I've been working on. It's a session layer on top of TCP or IP. It has secure caching as a base concept in the protocol. It also decouples identity from routing, and makes all messages encrypted by default. It's called CAKE.
I started working on it in 2003, and sort of dropped it once I got a job. I've become interested in it again recently and have started working on it again. If you live in Seattle, I would love to have someone to work on the project with.
Even if you aren't completely sure what you're doing, having someone who's interested and enthused who I talk to periodically really helps keep me motivated.
I don't know. That is a part of the answer, I agree, but there's more to it than that. That addresses the forked physical infrastructure, but not the forked logical structure.
In my mind, there are two kinds of addresses, and much trouble comes from conflating the two. One sort of address is an identity. And the other sort of address is a description of how to find you. On the Internet as it currently exists, there are many problems that arise from conflating the two kinds of address.
IP addresses (v4 or 6) are about where to find you. They contain within their structure a description of where on the net you are. Strangely enough, URLs and email addresses are just the same. Except the description they give is not about routers and address blocks, it's about political boundaries. Are you in '.com'? Are you in '.au'?
In my mind, much trouble ensues from mistaking these kinds of addresses for identities. It's one of the main sources of security and privacy issues on the net.
You can use identities for routing, but you have to be really careful about it. Gnutella is an example of one way to do this. It originally started with flooding. The goal was to find the 'route' to a particular file. You sent out a message asking about the file you wanted to know about to all the nodes you knew about. Then they forwarded your message on to all the nodes they knew about and so on. This was pretty inefficient. Gnutella quickly grew the idea of 'supernodes' who kept lists of who had which files. Now flooding could be kept to just the 'supernodes', and they could do some caching as well.
Anyway, these are just some ideas I have that sort of noodle around the edge of the problem.
Newsflash: The Internet is a series of (mostly) privately-owned and privately-operated tubes. Keep your regulations off my tubes. If I want to purchase services from a provider available to me that prioritizes YouTube and Netflix over Torrent traffic, why the heck shouldn't I be able to?
The problem is when that's the ONLY Internet you can realistically get. And given the monopolistic nature of Internet access, that's the likely outcome here.
You can, right now, today. How much would it cost you to string up a cable to your neighbor's house or set up a wireless link? How much would it cost them to do the same? Once you have a few hundred houses, you'll need someone to spend some time configuring it all.
It can be done piece by piece, person by person. It should be done that way.
No matter how you start a system like this, you're going to end up with a governing body at some point. People want order, they want to be told what to do, and there's always people that are willing... and on rare occasion capable of doing such.
You underestimate people. First, the 'sheep' argument, even in the veiled form you give it, is a cynical and lazy cop-out. Out there, somewhere, is likely a group of people who similarly think you're a sheep because you don't question some choice you make that they think is bad. But you aren't. If you learned about it, you might agree or disagree with them, but it's just a matter of learning about it.
Secondly, most people don't actually like being told what to do. They may not always understand how they're following orders, but they usually get pretty upset once they realize they're doing it. You talk to most people, and most of them are generally irritated by the various ways in which they feel they're supposed to be 'following orders'. Perceptions of those orders and their source varies widely, but almost nobody likes to think they just follow them blindly.
So, as I said, I think you severely underestimate people. And I think you're doing it because you don't want to do the hard work you would feel compelled to do if you didn't have such a negative and pessimistic opinion. Pessimists are right much more frequently than optimists, and that's because pessimism is a fundamentally lazy outlook.
Both the physical infrastructure and the logical underpinnings need to be forked. The current Internet is both insecure and not private enough. The physical infrastructure is easily controlled by a few central entities. It's all broken.
We should be building our own physical infrastructure and put fences in contracts that keep any entity from ever owning a significant part of that infrastructure. We should be adopting protocols that are secure, always encrypted and make it easy to be largely anonymous.
When its built, businesses will come, because that's where we are. But they will never, ever build it themselves. At least not big ones.
It took about 15 years to find some fairly effective control handles. This time, lets make sure it's at least 30 or 40 years before it can be figured out.
To me it seems better than TortoiseSVN. I suspect this is because the main developer of both switched what he personally uses and only maintains TortoiseSVN so as not to abandon a userbase that's come to depend on it.
I tend to not use office productivity software at all. I find it annoying, and it gets in the way of the kind of control I like to have over the structure of my document. I tend to just hand it to people I set things up for and say "Well, if you really want to use a word processor, I've been told this works.".
In fact, I find myself popping open the XML editor in inkscape reasonably often when I'm trying to make visual art. It's easier for me to see the world in terms of its underlying structure than its appearance.
They will end up with editorial control, and that would be a very bad thing. That's a big part of why our modern news media is so awful.
Maybe they could go to a model in which people could contribute resources to handle traffic load instead of directly contributing money? The big problem here is the raft of centralized servers and databases needed to keep Wikipedia fast and responsive.
Slashdot Mirror
There is evidence to show that the scarlet letter of sex offender status does more harm than good as it makes it harder for them to integrate into the community and makes them the target of vigilantism. And rules like these 'exclusion zones' make it even more difficult.
OTOH, there is a lot of evidence to show that psychological treatments programs are amazingly helpful.
That's my personal solution to the problem. :-)
We treat them differently because as a society we do not want to think about this sort of crime at all. We don't want to understand it. It's scary and frightening and we would prefer to class those who commit these sorts of crimes as monsters than trying to understand why and what might be broken that would cause these sorts of things to happen.
I also have a theory that every generation has a way of trying to class a group of males as totally unfit. Men and women are born in approximately equal numbers, but in fact we are somewhat polygynous in our actual behavior. This requires getting a large number of males either killed, or out of the dating pool.
That last theory I realize is highly speculative and somewhat trollish. :-)
That is a common misconception. In fact, the recidivism rate among people convicted of child molestation is lower than for any other kind of criminal. It is true that there is a core population of child molesters who are incurable recidivists, but that represents less than 10% of the total, and I think less than 5%. Look up real statistics from actual research on criminal behavior and don't rely on the stories fed to you by the media.
It annoys me how we decide to treat animals based on what we think goes on in their brains. We constantly discuss how big our brains are, or whale brains, dolphin brains, etc. We appear to judge person-hood purely on a judgement of brain activity. Yet we fail to support that in reality.
What really determines personhood in how we treat animals is if they fit into our social network, if they could fit into someone's 'monkeysphere'. That's why I'm saying that our conversations with dolphins or other animals should determine whether or not we can treat them as persons.
What do you know, my first 'first post' and I wasn't even trying. :-)
I think we should have standards for how we treat them, but I think that comparing the situation to slavery is somewhat over-the-top. Though it's really hard to think of some objective way of deciding just what rights they should have.
I think, maybe, we should just ask, if we can figure out how. Of course, then there's the morass of objectively identifying and interpreting communication. :-)
Holy logic fail Batman! Did you think about that enthymeme before you wrote it? If people are right because they are lazy, then people should be lazy so they can be right. You're trying so hard to push an irrational criticism that you have transformed a vice into a virtue.
I don't disagree, and I guess if you value being right as the best possible thing, that would be the logical conclusion. And that's not a thing I have a problem with.
*chuckle* No, it doesn't. If I were actually running an ISP, I wouldn't have a traffic management policy that looked anything even remotely like that.
In some sense, in the house-to-house network, everybody would be running their own ISP... Net neutrality rules are more to protect small people from the big players. But that's an interesting question. I have very mixed feelings about net neutrality.
What's GlobalJak?
Our control of government is almost wholly illusory, and I think that illusion is more dangerous than knowing for certain that we don't.
My wireless is open, sort of. I've been wanting a really good traffic management system so people couldn't eat all of the bandwidth if I wanted it for something. The stuff Linux currently has is really complex and poorly documented. Additionally, I don't think it can do what I want.
I have a protocol I've been working on. It's a session layer on top of TCP or IP. It has secure caching as a base concept in the protocol. It also decouples identity from routing, and makes all messages encrypted by default. It's called CAKE.
I started working on it in 2003, and sort of dropped it once I got a job. I've become interested in it again recently and have started working on it again. If you live in Seattle, I would love to have someone to work on the project with.
Even if you aren't completely sure what you're doing, having someone who's interested and enthused who I talk to periodically really helps keep me motivated.
I don't know. That is a part of the answer, I agree, but there's more to it than that. That addresses the forked physical infrastructure, but not the forked logical structure.
In my mind, there are two kinds of addresses, and much trouble comes from conflating the two. One sort of address is an identity. And the other sort of address is a description of how to find you. On the Internet as it currently exists, there are many problems that arise from conflating the two kinds of address.
IP addresses (v4 or 6) are about where to find you. They contain within their structure a description of where on the net you are. Strangely enough, URLs and email addresses are just the same. Except the description they give is not about routers and address blocks, it's about political boundaries. Are you in '.com'? Are you in '.au'?
In my mind, much trouble ensues from mistaking these kinds of addresses for identities. It's one of the main sources of security and privacy issues on the net.
You can use identities for routing, but you have to be really careful about it. Gnutella is an example of one way to do this. It originally started with flooding. The goal was to find the 'route' to a particular file. You sent out a message asking about the file you wanted to know about to all the nodes you knew about. Then they forwarded your message on to all the nodes they knew about and so on. This was pretty inefficient. Gnutella quickly grew the idea of 'supernodes' who kept lists of who had which files. Now flooding could be kept to just the 'supernodes', and they could do some caching as well.
Anyway, these are just some ideas I have that sort of noodle around the edge of the problem.
Oh wait...
Newsflash: The Internet is a series of (mostly) privately-owned and privately-operated tubes. Keep your regulations off my tubes. If I want to purchase services from a provider available to me that prioritizes YouTube and Netflix over Torrent traffic, why the heck shouldn't I be able to?
The problem is when that's the ONLY Internet you can realistically get. And given the monopolistic nature of Internet access, that's the likely outcome here.
You can, right now, today. How much would it cost you to string up a cable to your neighbor's house or set up a wireless link? How much would it cost them to do the same? Once you have a few hundred houses, you'll need someone to spend some time configuring it all.
It can be done piece by piece, person by person. It should be done that way.
No matter how you start a system like this, you're going to end up with a governing body at some point. People want order, they want to be told what to do, and there's always people that are willing... and on rare occasion capable of doing such.
You underestimate people. First, the 'sheep' argument, even in the veiled form you give it, is a cynical and lazy cop-out. Out there, somewhere, is likely a group of people who similarly think you're a sheep because you don't question some choice you make that they think is bad. But you aren't. If you learned about it, you might agree or disagree with them, but it's just a matter of learning about it.
Secondly, most people don't actually like being told what to do. They may not always understand how they're following orders, but they usually get pretty upset once they realize they're doing it. You talk to most people, and most of them are generally irritated by the various ways in which they feel they're supposed to be 'following orders'. Perceptions of those orders and their source varies widely, but almost nobody likes to think they just follow them blindly.
So, as I said, I think you severely underestimate people. And I think you're doing it because you don't want to do the hard work you would feel compelled to do if you didn't have such a negative and pessimistic opinion. Pessimists are right much more frequently than optimists, and that's because pessimism is a fundamentally lazy outlook.
Both the physical infrastructure and the logical underpinnings need to be forked. The current Internet is both insecure and not private enough. The physical infrastructure is easily controlled by a few central entities. It's all broken.
We should be building our own physical infrastructure and put fences in contracts that keep any entity from ever owning a significant part of that infrastructure. We should be adopting protocols that are secure, always encrypted and make it easy to be largely anonymous.
When its built, businesses will come, because that's where we are. But they will never, ever build it themselves. At least not big ones.
It took about 15 years to find some fairly effective control handles. This time, lets make sure it's at least 30 or 40 years before it can be figured out.
To me it seems better than TortoiseSVN. I suspect this is because the main developer of both switched what he personally uses and only maintains TortoiseSVN so as not to abandon a userbase that's come to depend on it.
You have a very amusing set of assumptions there.
I tend to not use office productivity software at all. I find it annoying, and it gets in the way of the kind of control I like to have over the structure of my document. I tend to just hand it to people I set things up for and say "Well, if you really want to use a word processor, I've been told this works.".
In fact, I find myself popping open the XML editor in inkscape reasonably often when I'm trying to make visual art. It's easier for me to see the world in terms of its underlying structure than its appearance.
I didn't know that Open Office did this. It's not common knowledge.
The conclusion presupposes three boxes, and I think you're artificially limiting your thinking by having those three boxes.
They will end up with editorial control, and that would be a very bad thing. That's a big part of why our modern news media is so awful.
Maybe they could go to a model in which people could contribute resources to handle traffic load instead of directly contributing money? The big problem here is the raft of centralized servers and databases needed to keep Wikipedia fast and responsive.