While the nuclear strikes were terrible things, when one remembers the brutality and sheer animalistic behaviour of the Japanese, it's hard to not think "what goes around, comes around".
If only it had been the Chinese that closed the circle of bad karma instead of America. Because arguably by your logic America in turn deserves comeuppance for the nuclear strikes--comeuppance which wouldn't necessarily come from Japan. So sympathy for, say, the victims of the Sep 11 attack... would be "largely misplaced"? Bummer.
There are only 2 reasons to "punish" people. First, to teach them not to do it again....
Second, to exact retribution in an attempt to show others the "consequences".
I can think of various reasons why people might want a penal system:
1) To rehabilitate transgressors and therefore curb recidivism ("teach bad guys not to be bad guys"). As you mentioned, capital punishment fails does not fall into this category.
2) To inflict punishment on transgressors in accordance with a system of morality ("bad guys deserve bad things") Again, as you mentioned, capital punishment definitely -does- fall into this category.
3) To deter would-be transgressors ("keep the good guys good") You lumped this into your second reason, but it is separate. Capital punishment, at least to some extent, falls into this category.
4) To improve civil safety by quarantining or eliminating transgressors ("keep the bad guys away from the good guys") You didn't mention this one... and capital punishment definitely accomplishes this objective, albeit not delicately.
--
It is possible to view the death penality as a deterrent and as a civil safety measure, and not as an act of retribution... although there are certainly other forms of punishment which accomplish those objectives as well, without all the killing. And since there are other things you might want out of a good penal system (fairness, temperance, adaptation to new information, etc.) the death penalty is probably only really attractive to those who value morality-based retribution over everything else.
I don't think it's a mutation. All the articles say that they have no information about the baby's father. It's obvious to me, at least, that the father is none other than Jor-El, famous Kryptonian scientist. The whole "myostatin" thing is just a red herring to cover up his unfaithfulness to Lara.
Actually, the kid first suggested "ten duotrigintillion", but since that term had already been trademarked in 1919 by King Features (as the surname of an obscure comic book character), Dr. K. had to go with his nephew's second choice.
This is amazingly petty of me, but I can't stomach using OpenOffice since they changed the name of the software to "OpenOffice.org". What, was "OpenOffice" not getting the point across?... Pettiness aside, to the uneducated, the ".org" at the end is thoroughly confusing.
I agree. They should change it to "Open Office Server 2003", preferably gradually by using the intermediate "Open Office.ORG Server 2003". That would clear up the confusion once and for all.
This is a good idea. I think I've seen this type of test used to determine whether the responder was a human, and it was very effective. I think it went something like:
Which of the following would you most prefer?
A: a puppy
B: a pretty flower from your sweetie or C: a large, properly formatted data file?
I can't remember if the puppy was mechanical in any way.
Unfortunately, the worm can (or can easily be altered to) just be transmitted via email or downloaded from a web page, and use local RPC to escalate the worm's privileges and install tftp, etc, etc. The vulnerability isn't something you can be protected from simply by blocking port 135. You need the Microsoft patch.
Also, unfortunately, port 135 isn't useless. RPC is a very useful inter-process communication mechanism. In a domain or other client/server environment, it can be practically essential to keep it open to some degree. Firewalling it off completely would cripple many organizations, but anything less than that is easily defeated by a goofball with a laptop (e.g., goofball takes laptop home, laptop gets infected, goofball comes back to work, laptop reconnects behind firewall, laptop infects work network.) Again, the only good solution here is to install the patch.
Well, the other good solution is to abandon Windows entirely. But the point is: port blocking is not a solution to this problem. At best it is a temporary measure you can use to try to weather the early part of the storm while battening down for the full force of it.
Good start, but you haven't converted all the way, for those of us who don't want to think in crazy units based on mulitples of twelve, or non-absolute scales with arbitrary datum points:
"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own 631 megaseconds old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 kilometer track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 or about 2.86 kilometers per second - it covered the last 2.9 kilometers in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 2.74 kilometers per second was set at 432 petaseconds. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo 86400-Secondly News, the Denver Post, and CNN."
(My apologies to those outside the US, for not using "kilometres" or "432 billiard seconds" and whatnot.)
Worse yet, a number of people seem content treating elections - even presidential - as a game. A number of my friends voted for Nader during the last election, knowing full well that he wasn't going to get even 5%, and not even necessarily suppporting his program.
Well, if you vote for someone whose platform you don't support to make a point, sure, you're playing a game.
But: voting for an unlikely-to-win candidate whose platform you do support is not playing a game. Voting for Gore because you want Nader but don't want "to throw your vote away" is playing a game.
Meta-voting is a game, and probably not a great one. Surely any vote for a non-winning candidate is "thrown away" in that it doesn't affect the outcome. Does that mean everyone should try to figure out who the winner will be and then vote for that candidate?
The best voting strategy should be to vote for the candidate you want. Even if your candidate loses, it lets the winning side know that there is support for that candidate's platform.
Unfortunately in the US we have this plurality-based voting system where the best strategy probably is to vote for Gore if you want Nader, to avoid Bush. Maybe if we had a runoff or instant-runoff system, then fewer people would be tempted to "play games" with their vote.
Slashdot Mirror
While the nuclear strikes were terrible things, when one remembers the brutality and sheer animalistic behaviour of the Japanese, it's hard to not think "what goes around, comes around".
If only it had been the Chinese that closed the circle of bad karma instead of America. Because arguably by your logic America in turn deserves comeuppance for the nuclear strikes--comeuppance which wouldn't necessarily come from Japan. So sympathy for, say, the victims of the Sep 11 attack... would be "largely misplaced"? Bummer.
Or Ironic like rain on your wedding day. No, wait.
1) To rehabilitate transgressors and therefore curb recidivism ("teach bad guys not to be bad guys"). As you mentioned, capital punishment fails does not fall into this category.
2) To inflict punishment on transgressors in accordance with a system of morality ("bad guys deserve bad things") Again, as you mentioned, capital punishment definitely -does- fall into this category.
3) To deter would-be transgressors ("keep the good guys good") You lumped this into your second reason, but it is separate. Capital punishment, at least to some extent, falls into this category.
4) To improve civil safety by quarantining or eliminating transgressors ("keep the bad guys away from the good guys") You didn't mention this one... and capital punishment definitely accomplishes this objective, albeit not delicately.
--
It is possible to view the death penality as a deterrent and as a civil safety measure, and not as an act of retribution... although there are certainly other forms of punishment which accomplish those objectives as well, without all the killing. And since there are other things you might want out of a good penal system (fairness, temperance, adaptation to new information, etc.) the death penalty is probably only really attractive to those who value morality-based retribution over everything else.
Logorrheically,
Saltine
I don't think it's a mutation. All the articles say that they have no information about the baby's father. It's obvious to me, at least, that the father is none other than Jor-El, famous Kryptonian scientist. The whole "myostatin" thing is just a red herring to cover up his unfaithfulness to Lara.
Actually, the kid first suggested "ten duotrigintillion", but since that term had already been trademarked in 1919 by King Features (as the surname of an obscure comic book character), Dr. K. had to go with his nephew's second choice.
I agree. They should change it to "Open Office Server 2003", preferably gradually by using the intermediate "Open Office.ORG Server 2003". That would clear up the confusion once and for all.
This is a good idea. I think I've seen this type of test used to determine whether the responder was a human, and it was very effective. I think it went something like:
Which of the following would you most prefer?
A: a puppy
B: a pretty flower from your sweetie
or C: a large, properly formatted data file?
I can't remember if the puppy was mechanical in any way.
Hope this helps!
Unfortunately, the worm can (or can easily be altered to) just be transmitted via email or downloaded from a web page, and use local RPC to escalate the worm's privileges and install tftp, etc, etc. The vulnerability isn't something you can be protected from simply by blocking port 135. You need the Microsoft patch.
Also, unfortunately, port 135 isn't useless. RPC is a very useful inter-process communication mechanism. In a domain or other client/server environment, it can be practically essential to keep it open to some degree. Firewalling it off completely would cripple many organizations, but anything less than that is easily defeated by a goofball with a laptop (e.g., goofball takes laptop home, laptop gets infected, goofball comes back to work, laptop reconnects behind firewall, laptop infects work network.) Again, the only good solution here is to install the patch.
Well, the other good solution is to abandon Windows entirely. But the point is: port blocking is not a solution to this problem. At best it is a temporary measure you can use to try to weather the early part of the storm while battening down for the full force of it.
IMHO, of course.
You're right, of course. Dang, I wish I had thought of that 1.00 x 10^0st.
--Saltine
Good start, but you haven't converted all the way, for those of us who don't want to think in crazy units based on mulitples of twelve, or non-absolute scales with arbitrary datum points:
"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own 631 megaseconds old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 kilometer track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 or about 2.86 kilometers per second - it covered the last 2.9 kilometers in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 2.74 kilometers per second was set at 432 petaseconds. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo 86400-Secondly News, the Denver Post, and CNN."
(My apologies to those outside the US, for not using "kilometres" or "432 billiard seconds" and whatnot.)
--Saltine
Well, if you vote for someone whose platform you don't support to make a point, sure, you're playing a game.
But: voting for an unlikely-to-win candidate whose platform you do support is not playing a game. Voting for Gore because you want Nader but don't want "to throw your vote away" is playing a game.
Meta-voting is a game, and probably not a great one. Surely any vote for a non-winning candidate is "thrown away" in that it doesn't affect the outcome. Does that mean everyone should try to figure out who the winner will be and then vote for that candidate?
The best voting strategy should be to vote for the candidate you want. Even if your candidate loses, it lets the winning side know that there is support for that candidate's platform.
Unfortunately in the US we have this plurality-based voting system where the best strategy probably is to vote for Gore if you want Nader, to avoid Bush. Maybe if we had a runoff or instant-runoff system, then fewer people would be tempted to "play games" with their vote.
Um, wow... looks like I can ramble too. Oops!
--Saltine