Complexity, attack vectors, having to spread out resources to commit to maintaining multiple file systems.
Complexity: Huh? The filesystem interface is already built. The only additional complexity is in the new module.
Attack vectors: Then don't load the module. Or if you're really paranoid, compile your own kernel and don't include it.
Resources: If there are people interested in maintaining the filesystem, who're you to decide what they should do with their time? And if they lose interest, the filesystem will get removed. Big deal.
Bender's Big Score The Beast With A Billion Backs Bender's Big Game Into The Wild Green Yonder
And I wouldn't say the writers were out of practice, so much as they weren't used to writing a 90-minute feature-length piece (the same problem is evident in the Simpsons movie). Futurama excelled in 22-minute installments. It'll be nice to see them return to that format.
Actually, in the end, I'd argue it's the other way around. Or did you not realize that Lasseter has green-light power at Disney for all their feature film projects?
In a world of violence, famine, plagues, tryanny, bigotry, hate... I really wish "scientist" could find practical things to bitch about like millions starving, etc. Seriously of all the things to whine about... light pollution.
So, which order do you want to tackle those things in? Violence first? How 'bout famine? Tough choice, I know, but... apparently we can only do one thing at a time, so...
B) Pollution is pollution, regardless of the source.
It's also important to note that light pollution doesn't just affect our ability to witness the natural beauty of the universe. It can also have a substantial effect on animal physiology and behaviour... including ourselves.
I am saying we should skip that decade where they go in and out of the criminal justice system before they have assaulted/raped/killed enough people to earn that 25-life sentence and give em ten (and make em serve most of it) on the first violent assault, armed robbery, etc.
And three-strikes, that oh so failed policy, isn't good enough?
Even gang bangers have a rudimentary understanding of risk/reward.
Well if you're interested in deterrence, why not just stick 'em in for life? Wait, I have a better idea, why not incorporate torture into the prison system? Or just kill 'em all right off the bat?
Hint: deterrence doesn't work. If it did, you'd see a drop in crime rates where three-strikes and DP laws are in place... but, funny that, you don't.
The proper approach is to attack the root causes of criminality. That includes fighting poverty, fixing schools, providing better support for single parents, things along those lines. You know, solving these problem children *before* they end up in jail. Unfortunately, your average whitebread, middleclass conservative, which constitutes a portion of the voting public, believes that's just nasty, evil socialism, and what they really need to do is jail those filthy "gang bangers" who are causing all the problems.
The problem is justice which isn't sure and certain has little deterrent effect. By the time an offender gets sent up for a long stretch or sent to death row they have usually committed a hundred or more felonies, been caught a dozen or more time and convicted multiple times. But they didn't go up the river. They experienced it, all their friends saw that crime pays and we now have whole sections of cities the police fear to enter after dark.
So, let me get this straight. Your theory is that the US isn't putting *enough* people in jail for long periods of time. And that explains why the US, who already jails more of its citizens than any other country, has such a problem with crime.
Hmm... I suspect I see a flaw in your little pet theory. Can you figure it out?
Because death as part of the punishment is ever so humane?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the US criminal justice system was never built to appropriately punish and reform prisoners. It's built to satisfy the victims that revenge is being meted out to their satisfaction. That's why prison rape and other violence, as well as the death penalty, are condoned if not out and out championed.
Personally, I'm wondering how long it'll take for people to accept torture as part of the method used to extract information from criminals. Heck, why not use it as a form of punishment, too? At least said torture would be done under the supervision of a physician, rather than at the whims of their fellow prisoners...
Well, first off, I should point out that I'm very much on the fence with this. On the one hand, I agree, we already tolerate all kinds of violence depicted in videogames, so it's unclear why this is necessarily different. OTOH, keep in mind, Japanese society is different, and so they have their own problems they need to deal with, which leads me in to my responses:
In any case, if is just about equal than the rest of the world then we can say they have more freedom without any evident cost; shound't that be considered good?
The problem is that, even if the number of rapes per capita was, in fact, the same as that for a typical developed nation (and that is a major assumption that isn't evident on its face), the important thing to take from that paper is that the acceptance of rape fantasies is part of the reason why rapes are under-reported and poorly prosecuted (rape is already very difficult to prove... doubly so if the judge accepts the idea of girls who object but actually want it). So, while you can say any random individual has more freedom, it most certainly comes at a price.
I'd like to know why as a society we accept murder without a problem but we just can't accept anything sex related.
That is a very fine question. But, again, remember, we're talking about Japanese society, here. Given the paper I cited, it seems evident that the acceptance of rape and other violent sexual material may have caused a significant problem in the criminal justice system. Given that, I can see the outcry over this material.
However, in general, I tend to agree with you. It seems absurdly hypocritical to accept games like Grand Theft Auto, which glorify the killing of innocents, while raising a fuss over games that depict sexual assault.
Of course, everyone fails to mention that Japan has the lowest rape rate per capita in the world. Perhaps it has something to do with the availability of such materials to quench the urge of would be rapists?
I thought the same thing, too. At first. Then I looked a little deeper: Far more likely is endemic bias in the system, both in reporting and in prosecuting cases:
For obvious reasons, it is very difficult to say what proportion of actual rapes is reported. Such evidence as there is, however, indicates that it is a small proportion: a 1997 study found that only 13.9% of sexual assault victims and 9.5% of rape victims report their attacks to the police (Burns, 2005: 48). Because sexual assault is a crime which can only be prosecuted if there is a formal complaint from the victim (Appendix 2), low levels of reporting have devastating effects on prosecution rates.
and
In 1990-1992 the rates of prosecution for reported rapes were lower than those for robbery, bodily injury, and violent acts (Dussich et al., 1994: 38).
In the numbers you posted above, you didn't include vacated decisions.
I tried including them, but ended up with numbers that were > 100%, which indicated to me that either vacated decisions were included in the reversals, or there was some sort of overlap. 'course, that looks like it may have been a bug in my script (or my data entry), given your spreadsheet doesn't exhibit the same issue.
BTW, I have no idea why I didn't think of a google docs spreadsheet. Great idea!
Anyway, you make some excellent points, and I can't argue with the analysis. It is interesting to note that the other courts seem to have gotten worse in recent years, as evidenced by the increased number of reverals from 2001 and on. It makes one wonder if that's evidence of a problem with the supreme court itself, rather than the circuit courts. Meanwhile, the 9th seems to have gotten better.
It'd be interesting to try down similar data for 2003 and on... I wonder if that trend continues?
And the entire point of my post is that they aren't as "wacky" as you'd like to believe. Hell, look at the 5th circuit. If it weren't for a couple low years, its turnover rate is surprisingly high. Same goes with the 6th and 10th circuits in the later years of the data.
Funny, I don't see any cited numbers there. Meanwhile, here are some real numbers from the Harvard Law Review (see the couple pages, which contain total number of cases seen by the Supreme Court from each of the circuits, along with number of cases reversed, vacated, etc) (alas, the document itself doesn't cite its sources, but I'll fall back on argument by authority and assume they've done their homework properly):
Now, I took those numbers and I made a couple CSV files, then did a little crunching (yes, I'm bored... what can I say, I'm waiting for the oven to preheat:). So, let's compare the percentages of reversed cases for each of the courts. A little Perl magic, and we get this:
Notice, there are plenty of years where the 9th's reversal rate is lower than other circuits, and the numbers certainly aren't wildly out of whack (I really don't see where the "95%" number comes from). But, why don't we look at the total percentage of reversals for each of the courts?
As you can see, the 9th circuit, while up there, is beaten by the 2nd circuit, and it's really not that far off from the others.
Of course, it's possible there's something I don't understand in the data. Maybe I have to combine reversals with some of the other numbers... but certainly, at first glance, the 9th circuit doesn't look nearly as bad as its critics would have us believe.
Yeah, I can definitely agree with that. But that's hardly mainstream, at least as I define it. That is, accepted by developers as a language to do primary development in (similarly, assembly isn't mainstream, even though it's sometimes integrated into larger projects written in another language (eg, C)).
It's already being used by some companies. The fact that you do not know about it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen - and I apologize that I can't be more specific...:)
Hah, I believe you mean *a* company.;)
Again, we'll see... to be quite frank, I'm firmly convinced that functional programming is just far too confusing for most people, and so it'll never truly go mainstream (I can definitely see niche penetration, but that's not mainstream is it?:), regardless of the tooling and vendor support available. But, hey, I could be wrong.
As an aside, F# does have one huge advantage going for it: the ability to very easily incorporate it as a component in a larger project that *is* implemented in a mainstream language. So you can write most of your app in nice, friendly C#, and use F# where its advantages really shine.
So totally wrong on point b. As usually, I'm convolving Eiffel, the OOP language with a fancy IDE, with Erlang, the functional programming language that's focused on parallel programming... *sigh*
the first time a primarily functional language goes mainstream, and gets documentation, tooling (IDE/debugging/profiling), and general support on par with the likes of C# and VB.
a) Being included in VS != mainstream. We'll see if it actually gets used by anyone (I'm betting not, but who knows, I could be wrong), and
b) Erlang, a functional language, has had quite advanced tooling (fancy IDE, GUI builder, debugger, etc) for some time now (and it wouldn't surprise me if other languages did, as well).
If a model is flexible enough, it can fit any data.
Wrong. If a model is flexible enough, you can probably make it fit a given set of data. But *all* data? No. If it could fit all data, it would be an *accurate model*... which is precisely what they're striving for.
Every time someone says "Think of the poor", what pops into my mind are the people I see walking through the urban slums.
Oh, well, that's just because you're bigoted (specifically, you hold prejudices about the poor). But, of course, living in your cushy, suburban, middle-class lifestyle, that's hardly surprising... you probably have no idea what poverty actually looks like.
But it's still far, far, far, far, far, far better than having a government-run monopoly.
And yet, at least in the specific case of healthcare, every single example out there demonstrates the precise opposite: government run healthcare is more efficient, generates better outcomes, produces better coverage, costs less, is less of an economic drag on business, and in general is simply superior. Why? Because, as the GP pointed out, and you've chosen to simply ignore, healthcare is an excellent example of an industry that's fundamentally flawed due to inelastic demand.
But, see, this is the beauty of faith. You can hold your beliefs in the face of vast evidence to the contrary because it's wonderfully irrational. You know, like fundies who believe the earth is 6,000 years old. You can show them mountains and mountains of evidence, but it doesn't matter: they believe what they believe, and no evidence will convince them otherwise. So there's no point in getting into the argument in the first place... their faith is simply unshakable.
Slashdot Mirror
Complexity, attack vectors, having to spread out resources to commit to maintaining multiple file systems.
Complexity: Huh? The filesystem interface is already built. The only additional complexity is in the new module.
Attack vectors: Then don't load the module. Or if you're really paranoid, compile your own kernel and don't include it.
Resources: If there are people interested in maintaining the filesystem, who're you to decide what they should do with their time? And if they lose interest, the filesystem will get removed. Big deal.
Doh... make that "Bender's Game". I always do that...
Two movies? Try four:
Bender's Big Score
The Beast With A Billion Backs
Bender's Big Game
Into The Wild Green Yonder
And I wouldn't say the writers were out of practice, so much as they weren't used to writing a 90-minute feature-length piece (the same problem is evident in the Simpsons movie). Futurama excelled in 22-minute installments. It'll be nice to see them return to that format.
Well, they do own them after all.
Actually, in the end, I'd argue it's the other way around. Or did you not realize that Lasseter has green-light power at Disney for all their feature film projects?
In a world of violence, famine, plagues, tryanny, bigotry, hate... I really wish "scientist" could find practical things to bitch about like millions starving, etc. Seriously of all the things to whine about... light pollution.
So, which order do you want to tackle those things in? Violence first? How 'bout famine? Tough choice, I know, but... apparently we can only do one thing at a time, so...
B) Pollution is pollution, regardless of the source.
It's also important to note that light pollution doesn't just affect our ability to witness the natural beauty of the universe. It can also have a substantial effect on animal physiology and behaviour... including ourselves.
I am saying we should skip that decade where they go in and out of the criminal justice system before they have assaulted/raped/killed enough people to earn that 25-life sentence and give em ten (and make em serve most of it) on the first violent assault, armed robbery, etc.
And three-strikes, that oh so failed policy, isn't good enough?
Even gang bangers have a rudimentary understanding of risk/reward.
Well if you're interested in deterrence, why not just stick 'em in for life? Wait, I have a better idea, why not incorporate torture into the prison system? Or just kill 'em all right off the bat?
Hint: deterrence doesn't work. If it did, you'd see a drop in crime rates where three-strikes and DP laws are in place... but, funny that, you don't.
The proper approach is to attack the root causes of criminality. That includes fighting poverty, fixing schools, providing better support for single parents, things along those lines. You know, solving these problem children *before* they end up in jail. Unfortunately, your average whitebread, middleclass conservative, which constitutes a portion of the voting public, believes that's just nasty, evil socialism, and what they really need to do is jail those filthy "gang bangers" who are causing all the problems.
The problem is justice which isn't sure and certain has little deterrent effect. By the time an offender gets sent up for a long stretch or sent to death row they have usually committed a hundred or more felonies, been caught a dozen or more time and convicted multiple times. But they didn't go up the river. They experienced it, all their friends saw that crime pays and we now have whole sections of cities the police fear to enter after dark.
So, let me get this straight. Your theory is that the US isn't putting *enough* people in jail for long periods of time. And that explains why the US, who already jails more of its citizens than any other country, has such a problem with crime.
Hmm... I suspect I see a flaw in your little pet theory. Can you figure it out?
That one is easy. It is evidence, it goes in.
Thus encouraging unfettered abuses by cops. Brilliant!
Thanks... I think I prefer the US' current fucked up system over your fascist wet dream.
Because death as part of the punishment is ever so humane?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the US criminal justice system was never built to appropriately punish and reform prisoners. It's built to satisfy the victims that revenge is being meted out to their satisfaction. That's why prison rape and other violence, as well as the death penalty, are condoned if not out and out championed.
Personally, I'm wondering how long it'll take for people to accept torture as part of the method used to extract information from criminals. Heck, why not use it as a form of punishment, too? At least said torture would be done under the supervision of a physician, rather than at the whims of their fellow prisoners...
Well, first off, I should point out that I'm very much on the fence with this. On the one hand, I agree, we already tolerate all kinds of violence depicted in videogames, so it's unclear why this is necessarily different. OTOH, keep in mind, Japanese society is different, and so they have their own problems they need to deal with, which leads me in to my responses:
In any case, if is just about equal than the rest of the world then we can say they have more freedom without any evident cost; shound't that be considered good?
The problem is that, even if the number of rapes per capita was, in fact, the same as that for a typical developed nation (and that is a major assumption that isn't evident on its face), the important thing to take from that paper is that the acceptance of rape fantasies is part of the reason why rapes are under-reported and poorly prosecuted (rape is already very difficult to prove... doubly so if the judge accepts the idea of girls who object but actually want it). So, while you can say any random individual has more freedom, it most certainly comes at a price.
I'd like to know why as a society we accept murder without a problem but we just can't accept anything sex related.
That is a very fine question. But, again, remember, we're talking about Japanese society, here. Given the paper I cited, it seems evident that the acceptance of rape and other violent sexual material may have caused a significant problem in the criminal justice system. Given that, I can see the outcry over this material.
However, in general, I tend to agree with you. It seems absurdly hypocritical to accept games like Grand Theft Auto, which glorify the killing of innocents, while raising a fuss over games that depict sexual assault.
Of course, everyone fails to mention that Japan has the lowest rape rate per capita in the world. Perhaps it has something to do with the availability of such materials to quench the urge of would be rapists?
I thought the same thing, too. At first. Then I looked a little deeper: Far more likely is endemic bias in the system, both in reporting and in prosecuting cases:
and
In the numbers you posted above, you didn't include vacated decisions.
I tried including them, but ended up with numbers that were > 100%, which indicated to me that either vacated decisions were included in the reversals, or there was some sort of overlap. 'course, that looks like it may have been a bug in my script (or my data entry), given your spreadsheet doesn't exhibit the same issue.
BTW, I have no idea why I didn't think of a google docs spreadsheet. Great idea!
Anyway, you make some excellent points, and I can't argue with the analysis. It is interesting to note that the other courts seem to have gotten worse in recent years, as evidenced by the increased number of reverals from 2001 and on. It makes one wonder if that's evidence of a problem with the supreme court itself, rather than the circuit courts. Meanwhile, the 9th seems to have gotten better.
It'd be interesting to try down similar data for 2003 and on... I wonder if that trend continues?
And the entire point of my post is that they aren't as "wacky" as you'd like to believe. Hell, look at the 5th circuit. If it weren't for a couple low years, its turnover rate is surprisingly high. Same goes with the 6th and 10th circuits in the later years of the data.
Funny, I don't see any cited numbers there. Meanwhile, here are some real numbers from the Harvard Law Review (see the couple pages, which contain total number of cases seen by the Supreme Court from each of the circuits, along with number of cases reversed, vacated, etc) (alas, the document itself doesn't cite its sources, but I'll fall back on argument by authority and assume they've done their homework properly):
http://www.harvardlawreview.org/issues/118/Nov04/Nine_Justices_Ten_YearsFTX.pdf
Now, I took those numbers and I made a couple CSV files, then did a little crunching (yes, I'm bored... what can I say, I'm waiting for the oven to preheat :). So, let's compare the percentages of reversed cases for each of the courts. A little Perl magic, and we get this:
1st - 0.00, 25.00, 100.00, 40.00, 0.00, 0.00, 100.00, 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
2nd - 66.67, 50.00, 100.00, 33.33, 50.00, 100.00, 37.50, 100.00, 100.00, 100.00
3rd - 60.00, 0.00, 33.33, 25.00, 50.00, 0.00, 60.00, 0.00, 0.00, 50.00
4th - 66.67, 50.00, 33.33, 50.00, 0.00, 55.56, 40.00, 54.55, 100.00, 0.00
5th - 62.50, 100.00, 60.00, 33.33, 60.00, 66.67, 33.33, 100.00, 100.00, 83.33
6th - 42.86, 50.00, 33.33, 33.33, 50.00, 75.00, 71.43, 0.00, 71.43, 75.00
7th - 28.57, 42.86, 100.00, 14.29, 50.00, 75.00, 50.00, 0.00, 66.67, 50.00
8th - 80.00, 50.00, 37.50, 46.15, 33.33, 20.00, 33.33, 60.00, 0.00, 75.00
9th - 70.59, 76.92, 71.43, 76.47, 55.56, 80.00, 64.71, 61.11, 56.52, 64.00
10th - 50.00, 20.00, 0.00, 0.00, 25.00, 50.00, 75.00, 75.00, 100.00, 100.00
11th - 33.33, 40.00, 33.33, 100.00, 75.00, 40.00, 100.00, 100.00, 50.00, 50.00
DC - 66.67, 40.00, 0.00, 22.22, 0.00, 0.00, 100.00, 66.67, 0.00, 33.33
Fed - 66.67, 0.00, 100.00, 50.00, 50.00, 100.00, 50.00, 20.00, 50.00, 100.00
Notice, there are plenty of years where the 9th's reversal rate is lower than other circuits, and the numbers certainly aren't wildly out of whack (I really don't see where the "95%" number comes from). But, why don't we look at the total percentage of reversals for each of the courts?
1st - 33.33
2nd - 69.23
3rd - 41.94
4th - 46.30
5th - 59.65
6th - 49.12
7th - 46.94
8th - 47.06
9th - 66.67
10th - 48.39
11th - 59.09
DC - 30.30
Fed - 46.15
As you can see, the 9th circuit, while up there, is beaten by the 2nd circuit, and it's really not that far off from the others.
Of course, it's possible there's something I don't understand in the data. Maybe I have to combine reversals with some of the other numbers... but certainly, at first glance, the 9th circuit doesn't look nearly as bad as its critics would have us believe.
Yeah, I can definitely agree with that. But that's hardly mainstream, at least as I define it. That is, accepted by developers as a language to do primary development in (similarly, assembly isn't mainstream, even though it's sometimes integrated into larger projects written in another language (eg, C)).
It's already being used by some companies. The fact that you do not know about it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen - and I apologize that I can't be more specific... :)
Hah, I believe you mean *a* company. ;)
Again, we'll see... to be quite frank, I'm firmly convinced that functional programming is just far too confusing for most people, and so it'll never truly go mainstream (I can definitely see niche penetration, but that's not mainstream is it? :), regardless of the tooling and vendor support available. But, hey, I could be wrong.
As an aside, F# does have one huge advantage going for it: the ability to very easily incorporate it as a component in a larger project that *is* implemented in a mainstream language. So you can write most of your app in nice, friendly C#, and use F# where its advantages really shine.
So totally wrong on point b. As usually, I'm convolving Eiffel, the OOP language with a fancy IDE, with Erlang, the functional programming language that's focused on parallel programming... *sigh*
I stand by my first point, though. :)
the first time a primarily functional language goes mainstream, and gets documentation, tooling (IDE/debugging/profiling), and general support on par with the likes of C# and VB.
a) Being included in VS != mainstream. We'll see if it actually gets used by anyone (I'm betting not, but who knows, I could be wrong), and
b) Erlang, a functional language, has had quite advanced tooling (fancy IDE, GUI builder, debugger, etc) for some time now (and it wouldn't surprise me if other languages did, as well).
string theory is kinda unelegantly difficult, so a lot of people don't really want it to be true.
Because quantum mechanics is so elegantly easy?
I think we need to face facts, here: no GUT is gonna be simple. If it were, it probably would've been discovered already.
No, it isn't just you. A lot of ignorant, know-it-all, non-physicist Slashdotters have made the same complaint.
It taking another step towards that theory good?
If it's correct, then yes, of course. Good luck with your chicken finger theory!
If a model is flexible enough, it can fit any data.
Wrong. If a model is flexible enough, you can probably make it fit a given set of data. But *all* data? No. If it could fit all data, it would be an *accurate model*... which is precisely what they're striving for.
Every time someone says "Think of the poor", what pops into my mind are the people I see walking through the urban slums.
Oh, well, that's just because you're bigoted (specifically, you hold prejudices about the poor). But, of course, living in your cushy, suburban, middle-class lifestyle, that's hardly surprising... you probably have no idea what poverty actually looks like.
But it's still far, far, far, far, far, far better than having a government-run monopoly.
And yet, at least in the specific case of healthcare, every single example out there demonstrates the precise opposite: government run healthcare is more efficient, generates better outcomes, produces better coverage, costs less, is less of an economic drag on business, and in general is simply superior. Why? Because, as the GP pointed out, and you've chosen to simply ignore, healthcare is an excellent example of an industry that's fundamentally flawed due to inelastic demand.
But, see, this is the beauty of faith. You can hold your beliefs in the face of vast evidence to the contrary because it's wonderfully irrational. You know, like fundies who believe the earth is 6,000 years old. You can show them mountains and mountains of evidence, but it doesn't matter: they believe what they believe, and no evidence will convince them otherwise. So there's no point in getting into the argument in the first place... their faith is simply unshakable.