$900 buys you 150 $6 keyboards. Instead of sterilizing perhaps they should look into making the top bit cheaply disposable, or come up with a more effective way of sterilizing keyboards than this UV crap. 66% seems pointless to me.
They may be more intelligent, but that does not mean they are better informed.
The media industry gets more money giving people what they want rather than giving people what they "should" get. You want "mental junk food" all the time? Sure no problem. Even google has been known to change their search results so that each user gets more of what Google thinks the user would want.
There are 24 hours in a day, you're not going to learn as much about the world if you spend most of it playing FarmVille (or Happy Farm which is more popular in China, and apparently the most popular MMOG in the world beating FarmVille).
When I went there for a short while I found that while most can speak Taiwanese (Taiwanese Hokkien) they seem to default to Mandarin a lot more. That may be because I was in Taipei?
They use a different script though- "Traditional" vs mainland China's "simplified" version.
But why are you trying to do all of that on a portable anyway?
Coz that's what the company provides. Seems like almost everyone is on laptops here.
Anyway, I recently created a development environment in a virtual machine on a server, and compiling and building there is actually faster than on my laptop. So I might start to do development on that more often.
I'm tempted to buy a 256GB SSD for my work laptop, out of my own pocket. But that's more for fun than need:).
Uh how does it suck? It's BECAUSE they are different that's why capitalism needs to be in check more than democratically elected Governments.
Who gets the power in democratically elected Governments? Those who get the most votes. The votes come from voters who each have one vote.
Who gets the power in free market capitalism? The ones who can accumulate/control the most $$$$/capital/leverage.
If a democratically elected (even though imperfectly) Government starts misbehaving, each voter has the same power (and responsibility) as other voters to change the Government or the Government's behaviour. If the voters keep reelecting a misbehaving Government, it's THE VOTERS' FAULT. They are saying they want it that way. A vocal minority might disagree, but so what? That's what Democracy is all about - the people get the power to change/screw up their country if they so choose.
Whereas if a Corporation starts misbehaving, only a few elites might have the power to change the Corporation's behaviour. Not all powerful corporations have millions of "normal people" as their customers or shareholders that they have to care about.
Those 147 companies may not actually have that much control over everything, but from that you should see that the normal person has even less control over many of the companies that those 147 "control" (own significant stake in), or those 147.
The boss of Barclay's does not have to care what those "OWS" bunch say or do, nor what voters say.
I guess that's why a lot of people are happy with doing their computing on tablets and phones.
As for me, my laptop's CPU and HDD still aren't fast enough to do my work stuff as fast as I'd like. Judging from the task manager, the CPU is the bottleneck for the compiling and the HDD is the bottleneck for the packaging part, and CPU+HDD for various tortoisesvn[1] stuff. And it doesn't have enough memory (firefox, chrome, email, IM, multiple visual studio instances, remote desktop, putty, etc it all adds up, good thing I don't need to run skype too- the last time I used it it was quite resource intensive)...
I think other slashdotters would also find performance not as good as they like (even ignoring those trying to brute-force AES-256 or stuff like that;) ).
[1] tortoisegit, bazaar, mercurial weren't as good on windows when we started.
Seems you've got too much faith in capitalism and free markets.
In a democracy (even imperfect ones like the USA) the voters choose the "winners" with votes. Each voter has only one vote. In capitalism/free markets (even imperfect ones like the USA), the "voters" choose the "winners" with money. Some voters have more "votes" aka "money" than others. The winners end up with more money. Go figure.
So if you believe that people need to keep their government in check, then even more so should you believe that capitalism needs to be kept in check.
It's funny how many believe that people can be influenced by "campaign money", "pork", lies, etc every few years to vote suboptimally in the ballots, and yet still believe that the very same people would somehow vote better with their wallets.
You could sign the form/url (and have a random salt). So the injected javascript has to figure out how to generate a valid signature.
For example: Slashdot doesn't do any checking so you can post a logout url, and if anyone's browser somehow loads that url, they get logged out. But if you add a random salt and a signature and tie it to some other secret, the attacker will have to generate or copy the logout url from somewhere.
The logout url will still have to be derivable by the browser, otherwise the user won't be able to logout, so in theory some clever javascript would be able to figure it out.
However stuff like CSP ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/CSP ) might reduce the amount of successfully injected javascript, and other protections could reduce the domains that the injected javascript can affect.
So it's an arms race, but all you need to do is make it hard enough so that the attacker tries something/someone else instead.
and monitor all traffic to detect anyone *attempting* to connect over any other port, and immediately greylist their IP Address for an hour. If they repeatedly do it, than blacklist them permanently.
From what I see in real-world firewall logs, there are often tons of IPs trying to connect to your nonlistening ports. And those can be from dynamic IP users. Blacklisting these permanently would cause more problems and not really help much (assuming your system is hardened and has upstream DoS/DDoS protections in place).
and kill the session if a single out-of-order packet is received.
If you're worried about that sort of thing, you should solve it by using TLS/HTTPS (correctly;) ) rather than killing sessions just because an out-of-order packet is received. If the attacker already has the ability to pwn a user's TLS/HTTPS connections, the attacker has no need to inject out-of-order packets to pwn that user.
If you're that paranoid what you could do is set up "honey data" and "honey rows" in database tables. For example, you could create customer records of nonexistent people/items who/that don't appear anywhere else in the world. If those data/records are ever accessed, it means something has gone wrong. And if that data ever appears "outside" (internet or elsewhere), it may mean something has gone very very wrong...
Another way for attackers to access the data would be via the backups and the systems that do backups. So even if your web apps and servers are super-hardened, it may not matter if the attacker can get the data via the backups.
so that you don't have to write documentation like "first go to start bar and select control panel and then find the "network and file sharing center" item and double click that and then on the sidebar find "manage wireless networks" and highlight a network and right click and select properties and find Security/Settings/802.1x/blah//blah/bla
The default AppArmor config on Ubuntu for Firefox was rather lax when I last checked it - it was more of a blacklist approach than whitelist approach- a pwned browser process could access everything the user could except a few directories.
They'd probably have to modify the air filter/intake sections since in many places the air there is rather dirty. And sometimes it's not just "conventional" pollution but dust/sand blown in from the desert areas
They've been getting low on coal every now and then - as in burning coal faster than they can get it (from their own mines and other places). They're using so much energy that they even run out of dirty energy, so they need to reduce consumption and also add clean energy.
IIRC Japan is many times more efficient in terms of productivity (goods, GDP etc) vs energy used. So there's actually quite a lot of room for improvement in terms of energy efficiency.
They've also been working on building lots of nuclear reactors. Hope they get those right though, or there'll be major disasters (China does get big quakes).
You continue to miss the point. Perhaps you should reread more carefully?
There is a reason why I said in my first post: "to leave their current gang (their old tribe)".
Yes they aren't our gang (way before we put them in prison). That's one of the reasons why many keep doing stuff that puts them in prison.
I proposed that what we need to do is get them to leave their gang and join a more beneficial one. Not do stuff to them that makes it more likely they'll return to their old gang and old ways.
Ever hear the saying " 3 hots and a cot".Life is stable for them with a place to eat/sleep. Many in the "free" outside world today would be glad to have that "insurance" as they sleep under a bridge/wherever.
In Norway and some other countries people don't have to commit a crime just to get shelter and/or food. I think it works out cheaper their way - less crime, fewer expensive prisons. Seems more civilized too.
You'll get many people bumming around, but they probably leech/cost less than those getting trillion dollar bailouts, or stupid patents that slow progress. Some will get bored eventually and try to do something productive or entertaining. Compose music, make videos, maybe even write OSS.
Plus if AIs and robots eventually get smart enough to do most jobs, leaving only a few jobs for humans[1], most humans will join the ranks of these "bums". So we might as well prepare a nice path towards a system where most humans can bum around in a civilized manner, than ending up with a few Kings, each with tech-priests, "worshippers" and slaves - which is what may happen if you continue with a free market "Winner Takes All" path.
[1] You already see this happening with those data centers that Google, Amazon etc build. They cost billions of dollars and make a lot of money, but don't require that many people to run. And the idea is for them to require fewer and fewer people as technology and processes improve.
Outlook sucks for email. Heck even Eudora is better for email and was better in terms of UI since the 1990s. 1) Searching for stuff is much better with Eudora - you can easily have multiple search terms for the same or different fields. 2) Eudora (and other sane email clients) do not hide email addresses from you. On Outlook you have to jump through hoops to see the actual email addresses. 3) Outlook crashes more (it does restart automatically, but it does crash). 4) Outlook is often slow and unresponsive 5) You can't drag the scrollbar and scroll down while having the message titles/subject lines update as you do it. 6) Perhaps it's a configuration issue, but at my workplace Outlook/Exchange's junkmail filtering sucks - way too many false positives. It's very bad when the junkmail filtering drops one/two emails from a customer but not the other messages from the same customer on the same/related thread/topic. I get far better spam filtering when using spambayes on my primary personal email account which I've been using for more than a decade (and has been exposed to all sorts of spamming and mailing lists). So far the false positives on my spambayes set up have been very understandable.
The only reason why I'm using Outlook at work is because it's the standard email client at work, it integrates with Exchange for calendaring, and I haven't got pissed off enough to try to see if I could actually get rid of it.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. As long as you do not fix that, the problem will remain. You put them in US style prisons and they'll certainly continue believing they are not your gang, and for good reason - by putting them in US style prisons you are reinforcing the belief that they are not your gang.
And as long as people "outside" continue believing "the prisoners are not the same gang", the problem of reintegration will remain and hence there will be higher recidivism.
As for the rest of what you said, I did address them, you and I both claim the problem is societal.
If making prisoners believe they are members of the "Main gang" is too hard (since the main gang is not really very cohesive), might it not be possible to make them believe they are members of a different sort of gang which does not reoffend etc?
You can't solve that problem by making jail more inviting,
It's not about making jail more inviting. A prison system that is civilized and actually _actively_ tries to help prisoners gives them fewer excuses to say that "They are against Us" and more reasons to feel part of the Main Tribe, to leave their current gang (their old tribe) and rejoin mainstream society (the "main tribe").
If you feel part of the tribe you are less likely to go against it than if you feel like you're in a different tribe. After all when they're in their gang it's not just fear of punishment that keeps them in compliance with their gang traditions and rules.
It doesn't make noncompliance impossible, but it seems more likely than if you keep reinforcing the "Us vs Them" thinking - e.g. humiliating them, treating them with contempt, not even allowing them to vote (very common in the US), etc.
It's different to be still considered part of the tribe and merely being in a "time out" for committing crimes, than to be considered a "prisoner" and a member of a different tribe - just POWs waiting to get out and continue their war against mainstream society (who is conducting a war against them).
Most (not all) humans are social creatures. Yes such stuff won't work on a few but maybe nothing is likely to work on them[1]. But when you have people who are members of gangs following gang rules, why can't you make them members of "Our Gang" and follow our rules?
[1] Even so you could still keep two prisons, one more open and one more for those who have proven to be a persistent danger to society and really need to be kept away for safety reasons (but not completely isolated!) for a legally limited amount of time.
IT IS A HANDOUT IF THE LOAN INTEREST RATES ARE BELOW MARKET RATES! Because you can just put the money somewhere which earns higher rates and then pay back the Feds and keep the difference. And they were below market rates despite what the Feds claim.
If the Feds loaned me a million at 1.39% (apparently it was 1.39% in certain cases) with easy repayment terms, I'd turn around dump it somewhere relatively safe that gives me 3% (for example), wait the required time, collect the 3%, pay the Feds their 1.39%, and keep the rest. How is that not a handout? It may not be a 1 million dollar handout but it is a 16 kilobux handout. If they loaned me 1 trillion, it is a 16 billion dollar hand out.
So the Feds basically created money to bailout the banks. You may argue that the trillions loaned out don't count since they didn't actually hit the rest of the world but instead eventually returned to the Feds. But the "free billions" from the loaned trillions do count, and thus there was net creation of money.
And every time the Feds create US dollars they are actually taxing everyone in the world who holds (or is owed) net positive amounts of US dollars. Because those US dollars become worth less.
What they did it is just a fancy way to create money to bail out cronies. Fancy enough to fool lots of people it seems.
It may be slicker than what Robert Mugabe and friends did in Zimbabwe (print money directly), but it's basically the same thing.
The difference between the USA and Zimbabwe is China[1], Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the world don't sell/buy oil/electronics/toys in Zimbabwe dollars and aren't owed an immense value of Zimbabwe dollars.
So it is a big deal to those who actually understand what is going on and will be (and have been) affected.
Remember in Zimbabwe when Mugabe printed those Zimbabwe dollars, he gave some to his cronies (who support him), and the rest of the country became poorer. When the Feds created those US dollars, did they give some to the US citizens? If they didn't then the US citizens should realize they are no longer considered cronies and may wish to reconsider their continued support of their "US Mugabe".
[1] the US likes to complain about China manipulating China's currency, but when the US owes China trillions of US dollars and then creates trillions/billions of US dollars to bail out cronies, who is really screwing who?
Slashdot Mirror
$900 buys you 150 $6 keyboards. Instead of sterilizing perhaps they should look into making the top bit cheaply disposable, or come up with a more effective way of sterilizing keyboards than this UV crap. 66% seems pointless to me.
They may be more intelligent, but that does not mean they are better informed.
The media industry gets more money giving people what they want rather than giving people what they "should" get. You want "mental junk food" all the time? Sure no problem. Even google has been known to change their search results so that each user gets more of what Google thinks the user would want.
There are 24 hours in a day, you're not going to learn as much about the world if you spend most of it playing FarmVille (or Happy Farm which is more popular in China, and apparently the most popular MMOG in the world beating FarmVille).
When I went there for a short while I found that while most can speak Taiwanese (Taiwanese Hokkien) they seem to default to Mandarin a lot more. That may be because I was in Taipei?
They use a different script though- "Traditional" vs mainland China's "simplified" version.
It's quality not quantity that matters more.
Obsessing over government size is stupid and just causes people to try to fix the wrong problem.
Would having a smaller number of voters be superior to a larger number of voters?
Only if you somehow get the right (good quality) small bunch of voters. Otherwise if you pick the wrong small bunch you'd be screwed.
But why are you trying to do all of that on a portable anyway?
Coz that's what the company provides. Seems like almost everyone is on laptops here.
Anyway, I recently created a development environment in a virtual machine on a server, and compiling and building there is actually faster than on my laptop. So I might start to do development on that more often.
I'm tempted to buy a 256GB SSD for my work laptop, out of my own pocket. But that's more for fun than need :).
Maybe he reversed the polarity? :)
Uh how does it suck? It's BECAUSE they are different that's why capitalism needs to be in check more than democratically elected Governments.
Who gets the power in democratically elected Governments? Those who get the most votes. The votes come from voters who each have one vote.
Who gets the power in free market capitalism? The ones who can accumulate/control the most $$$$/capital/leverage.
If a democratically elected (even though imperfectly) Government starts misbehaving, each voter has the same power (and responsibility) as other voters to change the Government or the Government's behaviour. If the voters keep reelecting a misbehaving Government, it's THE VOTERS' FAULT. They are saying they want it that way. A vocal minority might disagree, but so what? That's what Democracy is all about - the people get the power to change/screw up their country if they so choose.
Whereas if a Corporation starts misbehaving, only a few elites might have the power to change the Corporation's behaviour. Not all powerful corporations have millions of "normal people" as their customers or shareholders that they have to care about.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/11/21/the-147-companies-that-sort-of-control-sort-of-everything-full-list-revealed/
Those 147 companies may not actually have that much control over everything, but from that you should see that the normal person has even less control over many of the companies that those 147 "control" (own significant stake in), or those 147.
The boss of Barclay's does not have to care what those "OWS" bunch say or do, nor what voters say.
I guess that's why a lot of people are happy with doing their computing on tablets and phones.
;) ).
As for me, my laptop's CPU and HDD still aren't fast enough to do my work stuff as fast as I'd like. Judging from the task manager, the CPU is the bottleneck for the compiling and the HDD is the bottleneck for the packaging part, and CPU+HDD for various tortoisesvn[1] stuff. And it doesn't have enough memory (firefox, chrome, email, IM, multiple visual studio instances, remote desktop, putty, etc it all adds up, good thing I don't need to run skype too- the last time I used it it was quite resource intensive)...
I think other slashdotters would also find performance not as good as they like (even ignoring those trying to brute-force AES-256 or stuff like that
[1] tortoisegit, bazaar, mercurial weren't as good on windows when we started.
We do not need to keep capitalism in check
What we need to keep in check is our government
Seems you've got too much faith in capitalism and free markets.
In a democracy (even imperfect ones like the USA) the voters choose the "winners" with votes. Each voter has only one vote.
In capitalism/free markets (even imperfect ones like the USA), the "voters" choose the "winners" with money. Some voters have more "votes" aka "money" than others. The winners end up with more money. Go figure.
So if you believe that people need to keep their government in check, then even more so should you believe that capitalism needs to be kept in check.
It's funny how many believe that people can be influenced by "campaign money", "pork", lies, etc every few years to vote suboptimally in the ballots, and yet still believe that the very same people would somehow vote better with their wallets.
You could sign the form/url (and have a random salt). So the injected javascript has to figure out how to generate a valid signature.
For example: Slashdot doesn't do any checking so you can post a logout url, and if anyone's browser somehow loads that url, they get logged out. But if you add a random salt and a signature and tie it to some other secret, the attacker will have to generate or copy the logout url from somewhere.
The logout url will still have to be derivable by the browser, otherwise the user won't be able to logout, so in theory some clever javascript would be able to figure it out.
However stuff like CSP ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/CSP ) might reduce the amount of successfully injected javascript, and other protections could reduce the domains that the injected javascript can affect.
So it's an arms race, but all you need to do is make it hard enough so that the attacker tries something/someone else instead.
and monitor all traffic to detect anyone *attempting* to connect over any other port, and immediately greylist their IP Address for an hour. If they repeatedly do it, than blacklist them permanently.
From what I see in real-world firewall logs, there are often tons of IPs trying to connect to your nonlistening ports. And those can be from dynamic IP users. Blacklisting these permanently would cause more problems and not really help much (assuming your system is hardened and has upstream DoS/DDoS protections in place).
and kill the session if a single out-of-order packet is received.
If you're worried about that sort of thing, you should solve it by using TLS/HTTPS (correctly ;) ) rather than killing sessions just because an out-of-order packet is received. If the attacker already has the ability to pwn a user's TLS/HTTPS connections, the attacker has no need to inject out-of-order packets to pwn that user.
If you're that paranoid what you could do is set up "honey data" and "honey rows" in database tables. For example, you could create customer records of nonexistent people/items who/that don't appear anywhere else in the world. If those data/records are ever accessed, it means something has gone wrong. And if that data ever appears "outside" (internet or elsewhere), it may mean something has gone very very wrong...
Another way for attackers to access the data would be via the backups and the systems that do backups. So even if your web apps and servers are super-hardened, it may not matter if the attacker can get the data via the backups.
so that you don't have to write documentation like "first go to start bar and select control panel and then find the "network and file sharing center" item and double click that and then on the sidebar find "manage wireless networks" and highlight a network and right click and select properties and find Security/Settings/802.1x/blah//blah/bla
I proposed this:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/29001/
While it is supposed to be for phone support, it can also help "expert users":
The user can also type "tab" "B1" "space" to go item "B1".
If this was ever implemented, I'd probably use it to configure/control all sorts of stuff quickly.
And which user is going to set up those policies?
The default AppArmor config on Ubuntu for Firefox was rather lax when I last checked it - it was more of a blacklist approach than whitelist approach- a pwned browser process could access everything the user could except a few directories.
They seem to be making some progress on ALS:
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/GeneralNeurology/28129
http://alsn.mda.org/news/ubiquilin-2-abnormalities-connected-als
Hopefully it'll be fast enough for you.
They can also copy some ideas from Facebook (or others):
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/facebook-data-center/all/1
http://opencompute.org/
http://opencompute.org/2011/11/17/learning-lessons-at-the-prineville-data-center/
They'd probably have to modify the air filter/intake sections since in many places the air there is rather dirty. And sometimes it's not just "conventional" pollution but dust/sand blown in from the desert areas
They've been getting low on coal every now and then - as in burning coal faster than they can get it (from their own mines and other places). They're using so much energy that they even run out of dirty energy, so they need to reduce consumption and also add clean energy.
http://news.theage.com.au/business/china-coal-shortage-to-continue-20080116-1m7u.html
http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/coal-shortage-causes-power-cuts-in-china-20101221-193d5.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/18/china-power-shortage-idUSL3E7FI1ED20110418
Consuming less energy = consuming less coal = fewer power cuts = fewer pissed off people = easier and more peaceful reign for those at the top.
IIRC Japan is many times more efficient in terms of productivity (goods, GDP etc) vs energy used. So there's actually quite a lot of room for improvement in terms of energy efficiency.
They've also been working on building lots of nuclear reactors. Hope they get those right though, or there'll be major disasters (China does get big quakes).
Steve Jobs was born with an impaired conscience you insensitive clod!
OK I might pirate it then to see if that's true ;).
Not sure if I have good enough hardware for it...
You continue to miss the point. Perhaps you should reread more carefully?
There is a reason why I said in my first post: "to leave their current gang (their old tribe)".
Yes they aren't our gang (way before we put them in prison). That's one of the reasons why many keep doing stuff that puts them in prison.
I proposed that what we need to do is get them to leave their gang and join a more beneficial one. Not do stuff to them that makes it more likely they'll return to their old gang and old ways.
What's your solution/proposal?
Ever hear the saying " 3 hots and a cot".Life is stable for them with a place to eat/sleep. Many in the "free" outside world today would be glad to have that "insurance" as they sleep under a bridge/wherever.
In Norway and some other countries people don't have to commit a crime just to get shelter and/or food. I think it works out cheaper their way - less crime, fewer expensive prisons. Seems more civilized too.
You'll get many people bumming around, but they probably leech/cost less than those getting trillion dollar bailouts, or stupid patents that slow progress. Some will get bored eventually and try to do something productive or entertaining. Compose music, make videos, maybe even write OSS.
Plus if AIs and robots eventually get smart enough to do most jobs, leaving only a few jobs for humans[1], most humans will join the ranks of these "bums". So we might as well prepare a nice path towards a system where most humans can bum around in a civilized manner, than ending up with a few Kings, each with tech-priests, "worshippers" and slaves - which is what may happen if you continue with a free market "Winner Takes All" path.
[1] You already see this happening with those data centers that Google, Amazon etc build. They cost billions of dollars and make a lot of money, but don't require that many people to run. And the idea is for them to require fewer and fewer people as technology and processes improve.
Game? I thought Crysis was an overpriced graphics card benchmark ;).
No surprise if most people download it and don't actually buy it. They might only "play" it for 5-20 minutes[1].
[1] On a vaguely related note some people might spend more time trying to quit Assassin's Creed "properly" than playing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwOvuY0UbFM
Outlook sucks for email. Heck even Eudora is better for email and was better in terms of UI since the 1990s.
1) Searching for stuff is much better with Eudora - you can easily have multiple search terms for the same or different fields.
2) Eudora (and other sane email clients) do not hide email addresses from you. On Outlook you have to jump through hoops to see the actual email addresses.
3) Outlook crashes more (it does restart automatically, but it does crash).
4) Outlook is often slow and unresponsive
5) You can't drag the scrollbar and scroll down while having the message titles/subject lines update as you do it.
6) Perhaps it's a configuration issue, but at my workplace Outlook/Exchange's junkmail filtering sucks - way too many false positives. It's very bad when the junkmail filtering drops one/two emails from a customer but not the other messages from the same customer on the same/related thread/topic. I get far better spam filtering when using spambayes on my primary personal email account which I've been using for more than a decade (and has been exposed to all sorts of spamming and mailing lists). So far the false positives on my spambayes set up have been very understandable.
The only reason why I'm using Outlook at work is because it's the standard email client at work, it integrates with Exchange for calendaring, and I haven't got pissed off enough to try to see if I could actually get rid of it.
They aren't your gang, and they know it.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. As long as you do not fix that, the problem will remain. You put them in US style prisons and they'll certainly continue believing they are not your gang, and for good reason - by putting them in US style prisons you are reinforcing the belief that they are not your gang.
And as long as people "outside" continue believing "the prisoners are not the same gang", the problem of reintegration will remain and hence there will be higher recidivism.
As for the rest of what you said, I did address them, you and I both claim the problem is societal.
If making prisoners believe they are members of the "Main gang" is too hard (since the main gang is not really very cohesive), might it not be possible to make them believe they are members of a different sort of gang which does not reoffend etc?
You can't solve that problem by making jail more inviting,
It's not about making jail more inviting. A prison system that is civilized and actually _actively_ tries to help prisoners gives them fewer excuses to say that "They are against Us" and more reasons to feel part of the Main Tribe, to leave their current gang (their old tribe) and rejoin mainstream society (the "main tribe").
If you feel part of the tribe you are less likely to go against it than if you feel like you're in a different tribe. After all when they're in their gang it's not just fear of punishment that keeps them in compliance with their gang traditions and rules.
It doesn't make noncompliance impossible, but it seems more likely than if you keep reinforcing the "Us vs Them" thinking - e.g. humiliating them, treating them with contempt, not even allowing them to vote (very common in the US), etc.
It's different to be still considered part of the tribe and merely being in a "time out" for committing crimes, than to be considered a "prisoner" and a member of a different tribe - just POWs waiting to get out and continue their war against mainstream society (who is conducting a war against them).
Most (not all) humans are social creatures. Yes such stuff won't work on a few but maybe nothing is likely to work on them[1]. But when you have people who are members of gangs following gang rules, why can't you make them members of "Our Gang" and follow our rules?
[1] Even so you could still keep two prisons, one more open and one more for those who have proven to be a persistent danger to society and really need to be kept away for safety reasons (but not completely isolated!) for a legally limited amount of time.
IT IS A HANDOUT IF THE LOAN INTEREST RATES ARE BELOW MARKET RATES! Because you can just put the money somewhere which earns higher rates and then pay back the Feds and keep the difference. And they were below market rates despite what the Feds claim.
If the Feds loaned me a million at 1.39% (apparently it was 1.39% in certain cases) with easy repayment terms, I'd turn around dump it somewhere relatively safe that gives me 3% (for example), wait the required time, collect the 3%, pay the Feds their 1.39%, and keep the rest. How is that not a handout? It may not be a 1 million dollar handout but it is a 16 kilobux handout. If they loaned me 1 trillion, it is a 16 billion dollar hand out.
So the Feds basically created money to bailout the banks. You may argue that the trillions loaned out don't count since they didn't actually hit the rest of the world but instead eventually returned to the Feds. But the "free billions" from the loaned trillions do count, and thus there was net creation of money.
And every time the Feds create US dollars they are actually taxing everyone in the world who holds (or is owed) net positive amounts of US dollars. Because those US dollars become worth less.
What they did it is just a fancy way to create money to bail out cronies. Fancy enough to fool lots of people it seems.
It may be slicker than what Robert Mugabe and friends did in Zimbabwe (print money directly), but it's basically the same thing.
The difference between the USA and Zimbabwe is China[1], Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the world don't sell/buy oil/electronics/toys in Zimbabwe dollars and aren't owed an immense value of Zimbabwe dollars.
So it is a big deal to those who actually understand what is going on and will be (and have been) affected.
Remember in Zimbabwe when Mugabe printed those Zimbabwe dollars, he gave some to his cronies (who support him), and the rest of the country became poorer. When the Feds created those US dollars, did they give some to the US citizens? If they didn't then the US citizens should realize they are no longer considered cronies and may wish to reconsider their continued support of their "US Mugabe".
[1] the US likes to complain about China manipulating China's currency, but when the US owes China trillions of US dollars and then creates trillions/billions of US dollars to bail out cronies, who is really screwing who?