Borland C++ in 1998 and templates were something that only academics talked about. I have watched C++ change and mutate (into something that I don't like much anymore) C++ was brilliant with map, vector, and set, I sort of like auto, and the new for (each) loop is brilliant. But most use of templates makes code that I have to ponder for a long time to figure out.
I have recently started bathing in the waters of Python. What I have realized is that it is a core group within Python who are rightfully proud of their 3.x accomplishment. But they are solidly ignoring the fact that only a tiny percentage of people are using it. The reasons are quite simple people will need 8 modules for their system and 1 barely works with 3.x and the other says something like "mostly works" Well most people aren't willing to depend upon "mostly".
Now module after module is going 3.x but the other problem is that for most people having two pythons on their machine is a pain in the ass. I know there are tools to make this less painful but I can tell you an easy way to make it painless, Don't have two versions.
Then there is this call that you should begin new projects in 3.x; but the problem again is the two versions issue.
What bothers me about all this is that I come from a C++ / PHP world. With C++ I have upgraded countless times over many years and had close to zero problems with my code. I don't even know which compiler XCode is even using right now. With PHP my various upgrades have broken exactly one module and I hear rumours that the next big version of PHP will break one module in my older code. But I don't care as I am replacing my PHP with Python.
Where I am worried is that the core Python people will do something stupid like announce an end of support date for 2.7. The problem there is that it might be easier for some people to install a whole different language to sit alongside Python 2.7 and start playing with that instead of smashing their machine in the teeth and simultaneously installing 3.x.
Exactly; but perception is pretty much everything. The harbour near where I live has been massively cleaned up. It is at the same pollution levels that you would find at any of the popular beaches nearby. Yet the only people swimming at the local harbour beach are immigrants. I don't thing you will see born and bred locals using the awesomely downtown beach for at least a generation.
The river where I once lived was exactly the same. Nobody local would swim in it. Yet everyone went a tiny bit upstream to a provincial park beach to swim. Yet the perceived pollution had come from a pulp mill that hadn't been a pollution source in 30+ years. Plus that pulp mill was also upstream of the park. So these people thought that swimming near the city was gross yet the exact same water 20 miles upstream was perceived to be way better. I was not a local and enjoyed much time in the river in the summer.
I would love to hear your opinion on those people who have no technical reason for driving the double wheeled pickup trucks. Ideally the noisy diesel ones.
The key problem with such an elegant vehicle is that it fails the "Gives better than it got" crash test. SUVs and pickup trucks are popular because people perceive that they are driving a tank and will fare better against the various pop-cans out there. Quite simply if you are in a BMW X5 and have a head on with a prius then you may very well limp away with the prius crew ending up in body bags. With this perception then a vehicle like this will not get much of an audience beyond a few hipsters.
But at some point when driverless cars dominate (and ideally own) the roads then you could potentially safely drive a car made from non-tempered glass. Once this has sunk into car culture then people will wisely conclude that you want to commute (and park) in the least amount of vehicle required to keep you comfortable and get you to your destination in haste.
But while the roads are still filled with morons behind the wheels of multi-tonne homicide factories then any vehicle of this nature will be regarded by the vast majority as DIY coffins.
Self commenting code is awesome. Quick and dirty gets the job done before a financial disaster happens. And basically all light nimble frameworks started out as a homebrew framework.
The list of lies that bozo says are sure signs of a bureaucrat not an actual developer. It has been my observation that when a programmer discovers they suck that they turn to trying to make up rules, then they look like an expert enforcing those rules but all they are in reality is a petty bully.
While the US has been beating the internet like a redheaded stepchild it must not fall into the hands of an organization like the UN. Suddenly the internet will be whored out for every little pet project. Without a doubt suddenly the priorities of managing the internet will have nothing to do with the smooth flow of data from A to B but will reflect whatever whim or fancy that pops into the collective mind of the UN combined with whatever various countries can vote buy to get.
So if China wants to block something then they will buy a pile of votes from the Caribbean or Africa and suddenly 10,000 site vanish. Or if you criticize the UN you site will be taken down for 80 different reasons.
But the worst part is that the UN might be the most sclerotic organization running these days, (short of Sears) so any critical changes that need be done simply will end up in committee until it is way too late.
Plus the UN is a firm believer in "Real Politic" so they will cave in to every NSA type out there as opposed to fighting them tooth and nail. But don't worry they will publish papers as to how they are supporting internet freedom.
So if you want Russia, Bahrain, China, and even North Korea having a vote on the internet then putting it in a place where the UN will grab it is how that can happen.
A better idea would be to hand the internet over to a collation of countries that have a decades long history of good government, low corruption, low nationalism, and non-interference,: So I am thinking Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Austria, Canada, Austria, and of course Switzerland. You will notice that I am leaving out countries like France, Britain, Spain, Italy, the rest of Asia, all of Africa, and all of Eastern Europe. Quite simply it would be a disaster to give these countries any say in one of the most important technologies on earth. And if any of the left out countries wanted to leave the internet I doubt that anyone would notice.
The key to applying game theory is that most people are doing it without knowing it by balancing the risks and rewards. But you are correct many people are either uninformed or too thickheaded and don't make good choices. But my key suggestion is that most of the existing crime and punishment system is designed largely for crimes that are committed by people in person. But one could launch a drone via a networked connection from 12,000 miles away to commit a very local crime like a bank robbery or some such. Then if the drone gets away with the goods they could then reap the rewards with very little risk.
So if you are a risk adverse sociopath then what would stop you from going on a near endless crime spree?
If the crimes take place in a country will little international pull, say Jamaica and you are sitting in Nigeria and the Jamaican cops do somehow connect you to the crime then I still suspect that you will be fairly safe. It would take a fairly advanced investigation and huge international machinations to bring you to justice. Not impossible but much harder than some local guy waving a gun in the bank.
Now if you do the same crimes in NYC and you are sitting in Britain then the equation changes. Still going to be hard for the justice officials but well within their resources.
Those are pretty extreme examples but it still may apply where a guy robs a bank with a drone, flies the money to a remote location that he observes with a second drone and when the coast seems clear he flies the money to his location. Keep in mind that he can leave the money in the remote location for weeks if he needs to and even have the robot hop every now and then to a new remote location. They are going to need a whole new dye pack technology.
I am thinking worldwide. There are all kinds of stupid attacks in places that are members of the G20 as opposed to the G8. Basically think of where there are two groups that have a serious beef with each other but not a civil war, so China, Egypt, parts of India, Pakistan, and even vaguely stable places like Iraq.
The idea is that you know that in Syria they will use every tool at their disposal so no surprises there. But if it were to happen in Egypt then people would take some notice.
When a good bank robber gets going they will often rob dozens of banks. But yes there are mostly asshats doing it who thought that with no planning they could get away with it.
Actual my fear is that some bozo will do this every now and then causing a lockdown on any relevant robotic technologies. So actually my fear is that TSA types will declare servos a forbidden technology or some other such stupidity. So that saying "the only thing you have to fear is fear itself." is perfect. I fear a bureaucracy fueled by fear.
Look at Britain, they have this "knife culture" fear driven by the press and then run with by politicians. This makes my Swiss army knife a serious problem there. Also their police are legally less constrained when it comes to stop and frisks so I suspect that many person has fallen seriously afoul of the law for being a gadget nerd.
Personally I am shocked that throwing drugs to a few people in cages is the only crime a drone has committed. It strikes me that a crime committed by a drone has the huge advantage of being low risk as compared to committing those same crimes in person. Arson, terrorism, bank robberies, break and enters, murder, and why not go whole hog and even go petty thuggery and do some muggings?
Most of our existing justice system is based upon game theory. The idea is to dissuade criminals from doing their various crimes by causing them to balance the benefits of a successful heist against the penalties when they are caught. A simple example would be that bank robberies are very easy and generally net a fair amount of cash; and if done properly should be fairly low risk. So the idea is that you make the penalties huge with the hope that regular bank robbers will eventually slip up and then face a monster penalty. So even the average sociopath will think twice before saying, "stick'em up". But if you can reduce that risk to something resembling zero then your average intelligent sociopath should be out there causing all kinds of criminal mayhem.
I am willing to bet that before 2020 that we will see some very interesting crimes committed by drones, I am not talking crime of the century (although that is possible) but something where the drone was put to a very innovative use.
While what I am suggesting will be fun to read about; I am much more scared of the terroristic possibilities; again right now the only people who do the game theory on terrorism and think that the benefits outweigh the risks are either very stupid or very fanatical; these are circumstances that have generally kept terrorism as a fairly infrequent event. But again if you are changing the math so that being caught is no longer a near certainty then drone terrorism may very well become attractive to a slightly greater number of fruitcakes. I don't think there will be a tsunami of attacks but I am willing to bet that you will see a multiple of 2 or 3 times the number of serious attacks in normally stable countries.
But the sad part is that for the most part this type of technology will probably catch the public imagination and there will be all kinds of restrictions put on drone technology. The reality is that it will simply be another tool used by criminals and terrorists as the shoes they wear or the cellphones they call with.
Your recourse is to go to the bosses of the people who wronged you which will then make those bosses look bad.
Your other option is to go to the courts (run by those same bosses) and ask that they nail their brothers in the justice system. Judges are generally reluctant to nail cops to the wall in that they feel that it discredits the entire justice system when a cop is found guilty of something (or a judge, or a prosecutor).
So occasionally some member of the justice system does something so reprehensible and is caught so red-handed that they are forced to act; less out of a desire for justice but more to make this bozo stop being an embarrassment.
The key problem is that the entire justice system is designed to be adversarial; the result is a built in "us-against-them" mentality. So if you bring the lawyer equivalent of Mike Tyson you can literally get away with murder. But for the average Joe you are the 98lb weakling being thrown into a cage full of wolves.
So we can rail against these clearly unjust situations and try to figure out what could be done differently but the reality is that an overhaul of the basic premises of how the justice system works is in order.
My theory is twofold. One is that there needs to be a drastic reduction of the entire set of rules that allow people to be put in cages. This should be restricted mostly to people who physically harm people or their property. No more jailings for parking tickets, feeding birds (happened this week), or posting links. The next is that the whole idea of court appointed lawyers is a joke. If the court wants to spend $10,000 prosecuting you then they should have to fund an equal defense fund. Also the consiquenses for violating someone's civil rights should be horrific. Instant firing of basically every official involved. The arresting policemen, their boss, the jailers, any prosecutors involved, and certainly any judges who enabled the situation. But the most important part is that if anyone maliciously causes someone to be wrongfully convicted then they should instantly receive a sentence equal to the sentence given to the wrongfully convicted.
You might think this is a bit extreme but if you look at the sentence of the judge who was sending the kids to jail for cash kickbacks that is an excellent example of a good start. The prosecutors and police involved should be sitting next to him as they knew that something was seriously wrong but it made their jobs easier to just go along with it.
Plus if the penalties were serious then there would be no more "thin blue line" if a cop stepped out of line the other cops would basically throw him out on his ear and disavow him in 1 second.
The Japanese government and Tepco will do their damnedest to root out/discredit this guy who they will label a traitor. The last thing they want are other people writing the narrative.
The charges are stupid, but the media gag order is downright scary. There is a good reason the 1st amendment was written and it was that control of information is the ultimate in power. It was recognized that when the government is allowed to shut you up that it is then that the worst abuses can occur.
But this case highlights another serious problem with the US justice system and that is where, after this is dismissed, that the prosecutors will face little or no consequences for trying to enforce the will of a corporation.
And, of course, there is even less chance that this politically well connected company or its officers will face any consequences at all.
There needs to be some mechanism where governments that try to abusively control information results in horrific penalties to those involved such as serious jail time. Otherwise those who leak, those who film police, and those who deny inconvenient freedom of information requests will just continue to hide embarrassing information using the most abusive powers at their disposal.
For example, I can't remember the last time someone was arrested for filming and anything bad happening to the police who then tried to destroy the footage. This should be minimally resulting in destruction of evidence charges, and often kidnapping charges for the arrest. So no laws need to be changed or anything in these cases, just a willingness to realize that the police are not perfect little roses and that we are all better off when they are head up to even higher standards of justice.
Do you mean that the smart and the stupid both drive Audi's? I have been troubled by Audi drivers for years. Something I can't put my finger on. I find that it is often Audi drivers who are often borderline roadraging. The ones who give you the most attitude if you use a crosswalk or have the audacity to take the last parking space that you clearly got to first.
I also always thought of Audi as sort of a German Buick (not the R8 or TT) sort of built for people who want a German car but don't know really why.
The stuff I build is way to custom from start to finish for any framework to be much help and frameworks for my work are generally a hindrance. Right now I am flasking it and looking at Pyramid. My main problem is that WSGI seems to have a happy place with lighthttpd or nginx but with a large legacy php base mod_wsgi will have to do for now.
If you had a nation of perfect drivers then I suspect you could pack many times more cars on the road. But needless to say we have a bell curve. I find that there are a few smart people who are bad drivers but that many people who are genuinely stupid are also really bad drivers. So as these really stupid people start to find jobs they then drive to these jobs. So as the left side of the bell curve is being tapped for drivers you have a potential that not only are these drivers bad but that with each tiny addition of these magically bad drivers results in a massive set of problems.
For instance the last time I was in Washington DC heading south I got stuck in a 3.5 hour traffic jam. It was caused by one car that had managed to end up upside down in the ditch. So if you could have eliminated that single bad driver from the road traffic may have run fairly smoothly that afternoon.
So if one assumes that stupid people are worse drivers (which a UK study agrees with) and that stupid people are generally the last people to get jobs and are the first to get fired then you can't look at the total number of drivers or even road capacity but the probability that a supremely bad driver will have a stunningly huge impact on traffic patterns.
The other question would be to look at how long after an economic downturn that stupid people can keep driving. For instance in 2008 white collar people lost their jobs and many construction people lost their jobs. But did it take a while for the supremely stupid to lose their jobs. Or did they lose their jobs but it took until 2011 for their cars to wear out and for them to give up on finding a new job?
I distinguish bad drivers from the magically bad generally not just by driving skill but by decision making. Not being able to parallel park is different than going below the speed limit in the passing lane or getting a flat tire on a busy bridge and immediately pulling over and calling for a tow; or going the wrong way up a one way street and then insisting you are correct and all the other people are wrong; or making a left on a no left turn intersection which is marked that way for a very good reason; and on an on.
I suspect that you could test my theory by looking at the frequency of truck traffic and accidents (as a percentage of truck traffic) under that famous 11' 8" bridge that opens all the trucks like sardine cans. When the economy is poor my guess is that they only have the best drivers available but that in times like 1999 that anyone with a pulse gets a job and it is they who screw up. You would also have to adjust for hours driven that day as during a boom the drivers may also be overworked.
The other reason I distinguish between driving skill and brainpower is that I don't know of a single driving license test that tests(and fails) for wit and common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Borland C++ in 1998 and templates were something that only academics talked about. I have watched C++ change and mutate (into something that I don't like much anymore) C++ was brilliant with map, vector, and set, I sort of like auto, and the new for (each) loop is brilliant. But most use of templates makes code that I have to ponder for a long time to figure out.
Try xrange if you are using 2.7. Its use of memory for such a massive loop so much better.
I have recently started bathing in the waters of Python. What I have realized is that it is a core group within Python who are rightfully proud of their 3.x accomplishment. But they are solidly ignoring the fact that only a tiny percentage of people are using it. The reasons are quite simple people will need 8 modules for their system and 1 barely works with 3.x and the other says something like "mostly works" Well most people aren't willing to depend upon "mostly".
Now module after module is going 3.x but the other problem is that for most people having two pythons on their machine is a pain in the ass. I know there are tools to make this less painful but I can tell you an easy way to make it painless, Don't have two versions.
Then there is this call that you should begin new projects in 3.x; but the problem again is the two versions issue.
What bothers me about all this is that I come from a C++ / PHP world. With C++ I have upgraded countless times over many years and had close to zero problems with my code. I don't even know which compiler XCode is even using right now. With PHP my various upgrades have broken exactly one module and I hear rumours that the next big version of PHP will break one module in my older code. But I don't care as I am replacing my PHP with Python.
Where I am worried is that the core Python people will do something stupid like announce an end of support date for 2.7. The problem there is that it might be easier for some people to install a whole different language to sit alongside Python 2.7 and start playing with that instead of smashing their machine in the teeth and simultaneously installing 3.x.
Exactly; but perception is pretty much everything. The harbour near where I live has been massively cleaned up. It is at the same pollution levels that you would find at any of the popular beaches nearby. Yet the only people swimming at the local harbour beach are immigrants. I don't thing you will see born and bred locals using the awesomely downtown beach for at least a generation.
The river where I once lived was exactly the same. Nobody local would swim in it. Yet everyone went a tiny bit upstream to a provincial park beach to swim. Yet the perceived pollution had come from a pulp mill that hadn't been a pollution source in 30+ years. Plus that pulp mill was also upstream of the park. So these people thought that swimming near the city was gross yet the exact same water 20 miles upstream was perceived to be way better. I was not a local and enjoyed much time in the river in the summer.
I would love to hear your opinion on those people who have no technical reason for driving the double wheeled pickup trucks. Ideally the noisy diesel ones.
Yes and no, quite a few people commute in them.
The island of Canada? Nova Scotia is a few tonnes of earth moving from being an island?
The key problem with such an elegant vehicle is that it fails the "Gives better than it got" crash test. SUVs and pickup trucks are popular because people perceive that they are driving a tank and will fare better against the various pop-cans out there. Quite simply if you are in a BMW X5 and have a head on with a prius then you may very well limp away with the prius crew ending up in body bags. With this perception then a vehicle like this will not get much of an audience beyond a few hipsters.
But at some point when driverless cars dominate (and ideally own) the roads then you could potentially safely drive a car made from non-tempered glass. Once this has sunk into car culture then people will wisely conclude that you want to commute (and park) in the least amount of vehicle required to keep you comfortable and get you to your destination in haste.
But while the roads are still filled with morons behind the wheels of multi-tonne homicide factories then any vehicle of this nature will be regarded by the vast majority as DIY coffins.
Self commenting code is awesome. Quick and dirty gets the job done before a financial disaster happens. And basically all light nimble frameworks started out as a homebrew framework.
The list of lies that bozo says are sure signs of a bureaucrat not an actual developer. It has been my observation that when a programmer discovers they suck that they turn to trying to make up rules, then they look like an expert enforcing those rules but all they are in reality is a petty bully.
While the US has been beating the internet like a redheaded stepchild it must not fall into the hands of an organization like the UN. Suddenly the internet will be whored out for every little pet project. Without a doubt suddenly the priorities of managing the internet will have nothing to do with the smooth flow of data from A to B but will reflect whatever whim or fancy that pops into the collective mind of the UN combined with whatever various countries can vote buy to get.
So if China wants to block something then they will buy a pile of votes from the Caribbean or Africa and suddenly 10,000 site vanish. Or if you criticize the UN you site will be taken down for 80 different reasons.
But the worst part is that the UN might be the most sclerotic organization running these days, (short of Sears) so any critical changes that need be done simply will end up in committee until it is way too late.
Plus the UN is a firm believer in "Real Politic" so they will cave in to every NSA type out there as opposed to fighting them tooth and nail. But don't worry they will publish papers as to how they are supporting internet freedom.
So if you want Russia, Bahrain, China, and even North Korea having a vote on the internet then putting it in a place where the UN will grab it is how that can happen.
A better idea would be to hand the internet over to a collation of countries that have a decades long history of good government, low corruption, low nationalism, and non-interference,: So I am thinking Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Austria, Canada, Austria, and of course Switzerland. You will notice that I am leaving out countries like France, Britain, Spain, Italy, the rest of Asia, all of Africa, and all of Eastern Europe. Quite simply it would be a disaster to give these countries any say in one of the most important technologies on earth. And if any of the left out countries wanted to leave the internet I doubt that anyone would notice.
This conference was a nice test of character. Colbert failed, RSA set the bar for epic fail, and it looks like F-Secure gets a pass.
The key to applying game theory is that most people are doing it without knowing it by balancing the risks and rewards. But you are correct many people are either uninformed or too thickheaded and don't make good choices. But my key suggestion is that most of the existing crime and punishment system is designed largely for crimes that are committed by people in person. But one could launch a drone via a networked connection from 12,000 miles away to commit a very local crime like a bank robbery or some such. Then if the drone gets away with the goods they could then reap the rewards with very little risk.
So if you are a risk adverse sociopath then what would stop you from going on a near endless crime spree?
If the crimes take place in a country will little international pull, say Jamaica and you are sitting in Nigeria and the Jamaican cops do somehow connect you to the crime then I still suspect that you will be fairly safe. It would take a fairly advanced investigation and huge international machinations to bring you to justice. Not impossible but much harder than some local guy waving a gun in the bank.
Now if you do the same crimes in NYC and you are sitting in Britain then the equation changes. Still going to be hard for the justice officials but well within their resources.
Those are pretty extreme examples but it still may apply where a guy robs a bank with a drone, flies the money to a remote location that he observes with a second drone and when the coast seems clear he flies the money to his location. Keep in mind that he can leave the money in the remote location for weeks if he needs to and even have the robot hop every now and then to a new remote location. They are going to need a whole new dye pack technology.
The title should have said that enrollments were: enrollments*=1.22;
A mechanically extending boxing glove!
My realistic guess for petty crimes will be something where you swoop in and steal things that are small and valuable. Sort of drone pick pocketing.
I am thinking worldwide. There are all kinds of stupid attacks in places that are members of the G20 as opposed to the G8. Basically think of where there are two groups that have a serious beef with each other but not a civil war, so China, Egypt, parts of India, Pakistan, and even vaguely stable places like Iraq.
The idea is that you know that in Syria they will use every tool at their disposal so no surprises there. But if it were to happen in Egypt then people would take some notice.
When a good bank robber gets going they will often rob dozens of banks. But yes there are mostly asshats doing it who thought that with no planning they could get away with it.
Exactly, my fear is an overreaction when one finally does.
Actual my fear is that some bozo will do this every now and then causing a lockdown on any relevant robotic technologies. So actually my fear is that TSA types will declare servos a forbidden technology or some other such stupidity. So that saying "the only thing you have to fear is fear itself." is perfect. I fear a bureaucracy fueled by fear.
Look at Britain, they have this "knife culture" fear driven by the press and then run with by politicians. This makes my Swiss army knife a serious problem there. Also their police are legally less constrained when it comes to stop and frisks so I suspect that many person has fallen seriously afoul of the law for being a gadget nerd.
Personally I am shocked that throwing drugs to a few people in cages is the only crime a drone has committed. It strikes me that a crime committed by a drone has the huge advantage of being low risk as compared to committing those same crimes in person. Arson, terrorism, bank robberies, break and enters, murder, and why not go whole hog and even go petty thuggery and do some muggings?
Most of our existing justice system is based upon game theory. The idea is to dissuade criminals from doing their various crimes by causing them to balance the benefits of a successful heist against the penalties when they are caught. A simple example would be that bank robberies are very easy and generally net a fair amount of cash; and if done properly should be fairly low risk. So the idea is that you make the penalties huge with the hope that regular bank robbers will eventually slip up and then face a monster penalty. So even the average sociopath will think twice before saying, "stick'em up". But if you can reduce that risk to something resembling zero then your average intelligent sociopath should be out there causing all kinds of criminal mayhem.
I am willing to bet that before 2020 that we will see some very interesting crimes committed by drones, I am not talking crime of the century (although that is possible) but something where the drone was put to a very innovative use.
While what I am suggesting will be fun to read about; I am much more scared of the terroristic possibilities; again right now the only people who do the game theory on terrorism and think that the benefits outweigh the risks are either very stupid or very fanatical; these are circumstances that have generally kept terrorism as a fairly infrequent event. But again if you are changing the math so that being caught is no longer a near certainty then drone terrorism may very well become attractive to a slightly greater number of fruitcakes. I don't think there will be a tsunami of attacks but I am willing to bet that you will see a multiple of 2 or 3 times the number of serious attacks in normally stable countries.
But the sad part is that for the most part this type of technology will probably catch the public imagination and there will be all kinds of restrictions put on drone technology. The reality is that it will simply be another tool used by criminals and terrorists as the shoes they wear or the cellphones they call with.
Your recourse is to go to the bosses of the people who wronged you which will then make those bosses look bad.
Your other option is to go to the courts (run by those same bosses) and ask that they nail their brothers in the justice system. Judges are generally reluctant to nail cops to the wall in that they feel that it discredits the entire justice system when a cop is found guilty of something (or a judge, or a prosecutor).
So occasionally some member of the justice system does something so reprehensible and is caught so red-handed that they are forced to act; less out of a desire for justice but more to make this bozo stop being an embarrassment.
The key problem is that the entire justice system is designed to be adversarial; the result is a built in "us-against-them" mentality. So if you bring the lawyer equivalent of Mike Tyson you can literally get away with murder. But for the average Joe you are the 98lb weakling being thrown into a cage full of wolves.
So we can rail against these clearly unjust situations and try to figure out what could be done differently but the reality is that an overhaul of the basic premises of how the justice system works is in order.
My theory is twofold. One is that there needs to be a drastic reduction of the entire set of rules that allow people to be put in cages. This should be restricted mostly to people who physically harm people or their property. No more jailings for parking tickets, feeding birds (happened this week), or posting links. The next is that the whole idea of court appointed lawyers is a joke. If the court wants to spend $10,000 prosecuting you then they should have to fund an equal defense fund. Also the consiquenses for violating someone's civil rights should be horrific. Instant firing of basically every official involved. The arresting policemen, their boss, the jailers, any prosecutors involved, and certainly any judges who enabled the situation. But the most important part is that if anyone maliciously causes someone to be wrongfully convicted then they should instantly receive a sentence equal to the sentence given to the wrongfully convicted.
You might think this is a bit extreme but if you look at the sentence of the judge who was sending the kids to jail for cash kickbacks that is an excellent example of a good start. The prosecutors and police involved should be sitting next to him as they knew that something was seriously wrong but it made their jobs easier to just go along with it.
Plus if the penalties were serious then there would be no more "thin blue line" if a cop stepped out of line the other cops would basically throw him out on his ear and disavow him in 1 second.
The Japanese government and Tepco will do their damnedest to root out/discredit this guy who they will label a traitor. The last thing they want are other people writing the narrative.
The charges are stupid, but the media gag order is downright scary. There is a good reason the 1st amendment was written and it was that control of information is the ultimate in power. It was recognized that when the government is allowed to shut you up that it is then that the worst abuses can occur.
But this case highlights another serious problem with the US justice system and that is where, after this is dismissed, that the prosecutors will face little or no consequences for trying to enforce the will of a corporation.
And, of course, there is even less chance that this politically well connected company or its officers will face any consequences at all.
There needs to be some mechanism where governments that try to abusively control information results in horrific penalties to those involved such as serious jail time. Otherwise those who leak, those who film police, and those who deny inconvenient freedom of information requests will just continue to hide embarrassing information using the most abusive powers at their disposal.
For example, I can't remember the last time someone was arrested for filming and anything bad happening to the police who then tried to destroy the footage. This should be minimally resulting in destruction of evidence charges, and often kidnapping charges for the arrest. So no laws need to be changed or anything in these cases, just a willingness to realize that the police are not perfect little roses and that we are all better off when they are head up to even higher standards of justice.
Do you mean that the smart and the stupid both drive Audi's? I have been troubled by Audi drivers for years. Something I can't put my finger on. I find that it is often Audi drivers who are often borderline roadraging. The ones who give you the most attitude if you use a crosswalk or have the audacity to take the last parking space that you clearly got to first.
I also always thought of Audi as sort of a German Buick (not the R8 or TT) sort of built for people who want a German car but don't know really why.
The stuff I build is way to custom from start to finish for any framework to be much help and frameworks for my work are generally a hindrance. Right now I am flasking it and looking at Pyramid. My main problem is that WSGI seems to have a happy place with lighthttpd or nginx but with a large legacy php base mod_wsgi will have to do for now.
If you had a nation of perfect drivers then I suspect you could pack many times more cars on the road. But needless to say we have a bell curve. I find that there are a few smart people who are bad drivers but that many people who are genuinely stupid are also really bad drivers. So as these really stupid people start to find jobs they then drive to these jobs. So as the left side of the bell curve is being tapped for drivers you have a potential that not only are these drivers bad but that with each tiny addition of these magically bad drivers results in a massive set of problems.
For instance the last time I was in Washington DC heading south I got stuck in a 3.5 hour traffic jam. It was caused by one car that had managed to end up upside down in the ditch. So if you could have eliminated that single bad driver from the road traffic may have run fairly smoothly that afternoon.
So if one assumes that stupid people are worse drivers (which a UK study agrees with) and that stupid people are generally the last people to get jobs and are the first to get fired then you can't look at the total number of drivers or even road capacity but the probability that a supremely bad driver will have a stunningly huge impact on traffic patterns.
The other question would be to look at how long after an economic downturn that stupid people can keep driving. For instance in 2008 white collar people lost their jobs and many construction people lost their jobs. But did it take a while for the supremely stupid to lose their jobs. Or did they lose their jobs but it took until 2011 for their cars to wear out and for them to give up on finding a new job?
I distinguish bad drivers from the magically bad generally not just by driving skill but by decision making. Not being able to parallel park is different than going below the speed limit in the passing lane or getting a flat tire on a busy bridge and immediately pulling over and calling for a tow; or going the wrong way up a one way street and then insisting you are correct and all the other people are wrong; or making a left on a no left turn intersection which is marked that way for a very good reason; and on an on.
I suspect that you could test my theory by looking at the frequency of truck traffic and accidents (as a percentage of truck traffic) under that famous 11' 8" bridge that opens all the trucks like sardine cans. When the economy is poor my guess is that they only have the best drivers available but that in times like 1999 that anyone with a pulse gets a job and it is they who screw up. You would also have to adjust for hours driven that day as during a boom the drivers may also be overworked.
The other reason I distinguish between driving skill and brainpower is that I don't know of a single driving license test that tests(and fails) for wit and common sense.