Wouldn't the 'Justice System' be about justice? It doesn't have anything to do with blame, safety, or rehab...
"Justice" is about reaching a "just" conclusion.
Some would believe that the "just" result is to blame someone and punish them. Some would believe that the "just" result is to regret the incident, and prevent it from happening again (with no regard for the culprit's wellbeing) Some would believe that the "just" result is to regret the incident, prevent it from happening again, while eventually returning the culprit to society as a rehabilitated citizen.
The reason pretty much anyone can look at some legal decision or other and decide that it's crazy, is that individual opinions on what's just, vary wildly.
Hypothetically: "This person has a previously undetected high inclination towards violence. He always regrets his violent behaviour after the fact. He has now received counselling about how to control his temper, and is no longer considered a threat to society".
(Another "fix" might be medication. Or lobotomy if we want to get 1930s on his ass.)
If someone has a genetic disposition towards violence, then reformation is impossible.
Not at all. We all have instincts that we can learn to control. If you're quick to anger, you can learn to detect the first signs, to take a moment to compose yourself.
You probably can't learn this if you don't want to change. But the prospect of returning to prison might well give you an incentive to change.
Clearly, the "purpose" of imprisonment is to correct or reform the individual so they are no longer a threat to themselves and/or others.
I don't think it's that clear at all. You happen to have hit upon *my* view of what imprisonment probably *ought* to be for. But not everyone agrees by a long chalk. Why do we have multiple life sentences, in which the prisoner is practically guaranteed to die in jail, reformed or not? Why do people campaign to keep notorious murderers in jail, even when their sentence is spent and professionals deem them to be reformed?
It's because for every person who believes prison is about rehabilitation, there's another person who thinks it's about retribution. (Or, more realistically, a different balance of these two factors, and others).
there's a good consensus, excluding idiots such as yourself
I never revealed my own opinion (and I'm not sure I really know it). I do know that if you got 100 people into a room, you couldn't get 80 of them to agree on the precise purpose of imprisonment.
Most people would agree it's some combination of rehabilitation, incapacitation/societal protection, deterrence/prevention, restoration, retribution, education and denunciation/condemnation - but you'd get raging arguments about the balance between them. Arguments, no doubt, in which someone would fall back on calling someone else an 'idiot'.
(Categories borrowed wholesale from the Wikipedia article on punishment)
Is personal responsibility compatible with atheism? Before you break out the troll mods, I ask this in seriousness. If we are nothing more than a chemical being, then where does personal responsibility come into play?
How is this train of thought any different for a theist? "If God's creations, enacting his will, then where does personal responsibility come into play?"
But if you go down that 'lack of free will' route, then crime was predestined, this subsequent capture was predestined, the judge was predestined to set that particular sentence too, and everything about the whole world is basically pointless.
So it's best to assume free will exists for practical purposes. Save the metaphysics for those insomniac nights (or take a philosophy degree).
OK, we all want to support the underdog here. I know I do.
But seriously, what new, patentable ideas, do you need in an eBook? Make a computer (covered by existing patents), give it an e-paper screen (existing patents) an input device (touch screen, keyboard, rollerball, touchpad - all existing patents), storage (existing patents), OS (existing patents) and some applications (most notably, an eBook reader - existing patents).
I know people patent all kinds of obvious ideas, but I can't for the life of me see any novel ideas that need solving, cobbling together existing components into an eBook.
Oh, and all these stories are myths. They aren't history.
What's suggested is that they're myths grounded in events that happened at some point in human history. If the sea level rose suddenly, there would, 50 years later, be *lots* of old people telling rapt children "We had a big settlement, but one day there was a great flood, and now that settlement is under the sea".
Over centuries, you'd get embellishments to make the fully formed myths that exist to this day.
I take your point about Plato and Atlantis, although I suspect he'd have been informed by an existing meme.
Except that it didn't happen in just a few days....
There are fairly mainstream theories that as the Ice Age ended, ice deposits in the Arctic melted into enormous lakes. Really enormous lakes. All that was holding this water in was ice. When finally the ice holding all this water in melted and cracked, all that water was released in a sudden catastrophic event. Rivers to dwarf anything we have today. Sea levels globally rising by several metres, in a matter of days.
I was always dubious about the idea that a gradual rise in sea levels would result in all those deluge myths worldwide (Atlantis, Cantre'r Gwaelod, Noah, etc.). I'm much more convinced if it can be sudden. That would certainly enter into oral history.
Unfortunately the best source I can offer right now is the Beringia Museum in Whitehorse, British Columbia. A bit of a trek for most people. I guess if I were to Google a bit I could find something online, but hey, I ain't gonna.
One of the adversized features of ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery is that all network communications between password recovery clients and the server are securely encrypted. How is that possible, I wonder.
SSL would do. There's no real magic going on in that network conversation. "Try passwords 'alphabet' through to 'backgammon' and tell me when you're done".
I was under the impression that crypto like PGP was based on stuff which would (in theory) take millions of years to crack even with every machine on earth dedicated to it?
Yes, but the search space is significantly lower if you assume an password that's 1-8 latin alphanumeric characters, as this exercise did.
It's still 122 days on 10 VMs. One tenth of that on 100VMs.
The smart thing to do would be to offload the streaming to a suitable DSP chip. I have no idea to what extent the BeagleBoard supports this (probably does).
You have to bear in mind that none of this will really be free. The 3G connection will be used to download content, which will cost money. Some of that money will go to the 3G network provider.
Just like with Kindle, where a ebook sales provide Amazon enough money to pay for all that "free" browsing.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't the 'Justice System' be about justice? It doesn't have anything to do with blame, safety, or rehab...
"Justice" is about reaching a "just" conclusion.
Some would believe that the "just" result is to blame someone and punish them.
Some would believe that the "just" result is to regret the incident, and prevent it from happening again (with no regard for the culprit's wellbeing)
Some would believe that the "just" result is to regret the incident, prevent it from happening again, while eventually returning the culprit to society as a rehabilitated citizen.
The reason pretty much anyone can look at some legal decision or other and decide that it's crazy, is that individual opinions on what's just, vary wildly.
Hypothetically:
"This person has a previously undetected high inclination towards violence. He always regrets his violent behaviour after the fact. He has now received counselling about how to control his temper, and is no longer considered a threat to society".
(Another "fix" might be medication. Or lobotomy if we want to get 1930s on his ass.)
If someone has a genetic disposition towards violence, then reformation is impossible.
Not at all. We all have instincts that we can learn to control. If you're quick to anger, you can learn to detect the first signs, to take a moment to compose yourself.
You probably can't learn this if you don't want to change. But the prospect of returning to prison might well give you an incentive to change.
Clearly, the "purpose" of imprisonment is to correct or reform the individual so they are no longer a threat to themselves and/or others.
I don't think it's that clear at all. You happen to have hit upon *my* view of what imprisonment probably *ought* to be for. But not everyone agrees by a long chalk. Why do we have multiple life sentences, in which the prisoner is practically guaranteed to die in jail, reformed or not? Why do people campaign to keep notorious murderers in jail, even when their sentence is spent and professionals deem them to be reformed?
It's because for every person who believes prison is about rehabilitation, there's another person who thinks it's about retribution. (Or, more realistically, a different balance of these two factors, and others).
there's a good consensus, excluding idiots such as yourself
I never revealed my own opinion (and I'm not sure I really know it). I do know that if you got 100 people into a room, you couldn't get 80 of them to agree on the precise purpose of imprisonment.
Most people would agree it's some combination of rehabilitation, incapacitation/societal protection, deterrence/prevention, restoration, retribution, education and denunciation/condemnation - but you'd get raging arguments about the balance between them. Arguments, no doubt, in which someone would fall back on calling someone else an 'idiot'.
(Categories borrowed wholesale from the Wikipedia article on punishment)
You're confusing your own conviction, with a consensus.
Truly, there is no consensus, and there probably never will be.
Is personal responsibility compatible with atheism? Before you break out the troll mods, I ask this in seriousness. If we are nothing more than a chemical being, then where does personal responsibility come into play?
How is this train of thought any different for a theist? "If God's creations, enacting his will, then where does personal responsibility come into play?"
But if you go down that 'lack of free will' route, then crime was predestined, this subsequent capture was predestined, the judge was predestined to set that particular sentence too, and everything about the whole world is basically pointless.
So it's best to assume free will exists for practical purposes. Save the metaphysics for those insomniac nights (or take a philosophy degree).
By that logic, isn't he more dangerous, and therefore should get a longer sentence?
Only if the purpose of imprisonment is to keep dangerous people off the street.
Finding a consensus on the purpose of imprisonment is pretty much impossible.
I guess I miswrote. I can't for the life of me see any problems that require solving with novel ideas.
OK, we all want to support the underdog here. I know I do.
But seriously, what new, patentable ideas, do you need in an eBook? Make a computer (covered by existing patents), give it an e-paper screen (existing patents) an input device (touch screen, keyboard, rollerball, touchpad - all existing patents), storage (existing patents), OS (existing patents) and some applications (most notably, an eBook reader - existing patents).
I know people patent all kinds of obvious ideas, but I can't for the life of me see any novel ideas that need solving, cobbling together existing components into an eBook.
Xvid, WMV, MPEG1/2/4, Quicktime, even freakin' Real. VCDs, DVDs, great!
Local HD, USB, SMB, NFS, UPnP, iTunes....
Here's what the revelation was for me:
Sometimes I'd get video files packed into RAR archives. I'd grumble about having to unpack them before playing them in XBMC.
Then by accident, browsed into a RAR from within XBMC. This thing will stream video files from inside RARs on the fly!
And it plays formats I can't get my Windows box or Mac to recognise.
We really only have one ocean, it's just convenient to apply different names to parts that have a large continent between them.
Although where oceans meet, you can sometimes actually see the boundary - different temperature water, currents colliding etc.
Yes, those natural boundaries move, and it's fairly arbitrary which ones we call ocean boundaries. A bit like countries, really :)
As I followed up another correction - my mistake.
If it's any consolation, I bloody loved Yukon.
Oh, and all these stories are myths. They aren't history.
What's suggested is that they're myths grounded in events that happened at some point in human history. If the sea level rose suddenly, there would, 50 years later, be *lots* of old people telling rapt children "We had a big settlement, but one day there was a great flood, and now that settlement is under the sea".
Over centuries, you'd get embellishments to make the fully formed myths that exist to this day.
I take your point about Plato and Atlantis, although I suspect he'd have been informed by an existing meme.
You can dive to actual pre-deluge settlements: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/16/lost-greek-city-atlantis-myth
My mistake. It had been a long drive :)
Except that it didn't happen in just a few days....
There are fairly mainstream theories that as the Ice Age ended, ice deposits in the Arctic melted into enormous lakes. Really enormous lakes. All that was holding this water in was ice. When finally the ice holding all this water in melted and cracked, all that water was released in a sudden catastrophic event. Rivers to dwarf anything we have today. Sea levels globally rising by several metres, in a matter of days.
I was always dubious about the idea that a gradual rise in sea levels would result in all those deluge myths worldwide (Atlantis, Cantre'r Gwaelod, Noah, etc.). I'm much more convinced if it can be sudden. That would certainly enter into oral history.
Unfortunately the best source I can offer right now is the Beringia Museum in Whitehorse, British Columbia. A bit of a trek for most people. I guess if I were to Google a bit I could find something online, but hey, I ain't gonna.
Only if your communications with the cloud are in the clear. Why would they be?
One of the adversized features of ElcomSoft Distributed Password Recovery is that all network communications between password recovery clients and the server are securely encrypted. How is that possible, I wonder.
SSL would do. There's no real magic going on in that network conversation. "Try passwords 'alphabet' through to 'backgammon' and tell me when you're done".
No, they've been approached by a client who's forgotten the password they used. The client's told them they used 1-8 alphanumerics in the password.
In this case, the mapping to a binary key is irrelevant to the size of the brute forcing task.
In this case, it sounds like the customer was pretty glad they'd used weak passwords.
The implication is that they'd locked some files up in an encrypted zip, forgotten the password, and wanted the contents back.
If they'd chosen a stronger key, they'd not have got their files back.
TFA:
This analysis may be insightful as you develop your enterprise password policies, or choose your personal passwords.
(A good password policy is: don't forget your passwords!)
I was under the impression that crypto like PGP was based on stuff which would (in theory) take millions of years to crack even with every machine on earth dedicated to it?
Yes, but the search space is significantly lower if you assume an password that's 1-8 latin alphanumeric characters, as this exercise did.
It's still 122 days on 10 VMs. One tenth of that on 100VMs.
does it enforce DRM?
XBMC? The media player that plays video files inside RARs on the fly?
No, enforcing DRM is not one of their priorities.
/me follows up self.
See other people's posts above. The BB has a TI decoder chip on it as standard.
The smart thing to do would be to offload the streaming to a suitable DSP chip. I have no idea to what extent the BeagleBoard supports this (probably does).
Who knows. Probably Japan at first.
You have to bear in mind that none of this will really be free. The 3G connection will be used to download content, which will cost money. Some of that money will go to the 3G network provider.
Just like with Kindle, where a ebook sales provide Amazon enough money to pay for all that "free" browsing.