Reoffend and are caught and convicted! A very low percentage of these crimes reach that point, so a 8.5% reconviction rate within just 6 years is actually extremely high, and the bleeding hearts lose.
From the paper you cited: Distinctions were drawn between reconvictions for sexual, violent non-sexual and other offences. Tables 1 and 2 show that 4.3% were reconvicted of a sexual offence within four years of their release from prison; 8.5% within six years. All these convictions resulted in a further lengthy custodial sentence. When 'serious' violent offences (those resulting in imprisonment) were added, the proportion reconvicted rose to 9.3% within four years and 12.8% within six years. The total percentage imprisoned for any offence was 12.8% within four years and 18.1% within six years. Altogether, 23.5% and 30.9% were reconvicted of any offence (whether imprisoned or not) by the end of the fourand six-year follow-up periods.
The problem is that we have a severely confounded notion of what jail is for, is it: 1) to work off your debt to society 2) to punish you 3) to protect society from the likelihood you will misbehave again 4) to discourage others from misbehaving 5) to satisfy society's lust for vengeance
In the case of sex offenders, I believe most people are concerned with #3, and the problem is that the sentence terms aren't nearly long enough based on the rate of recidivism. These crimes should all carry life sentencing based on that premise alone, because there is no way to effectively decide who is safe to release, nor is there any therapy other than castration with reasonably proven efficacy.
You should consider adopting test first development, this will have numerous advantages for your situation:
"It is buggy, slow, fragile, and a nightmare to maintain."
1) Test first code isn't buggy. It has tests that prove the correctness for all important cases. 2) Test first code isn't fragile. It has tests that allow easy refactoring without risk of unknowingly breaking an important use case. 3) Test first code isn't a nightmare to maintain, for the same reason as #2. The tests also help to document the use cases in a way that comments frequently fail to do.
It won't do anything about slow, unless your test cases help to specify minimum performance levels. In which case it can solve that problem too.
As a coding practice, it has one main additional advantage: it has good empirical results, and that's sellable to management. Management likes good practices, particularly one you can sell as cutting costs in qa through automation.
The second part is assignment of inventions which is almost alway completely separate. Or at least it should be. If you are employed in a "creative" capacity where it is your job to come up with new things, do you honestly believe that you should have the right to (a) come up with something new that is within the scope of your job, (b) quit, and (c) form a new company to exploit this new idea?
If it's a non-patentable idea, then absolutely, yes. If it's patentable, there's no problem to begin with, as the first company has the paper trail to fight and win this in court. Assignment of IP created on the job is perfectly reasonable. But only that. Recreation of the IP off the job from knowledge is completely moral.
Sure, there are people that have tried to behave ethically and gotten screwed. But for every one of those there have been people that have lied, cheated and stole from their employer. And in my experience the far larger quantity has been on the side of unethical behavior.
If you believe that, you are either grossly underexperienced, or blind. Employer exploitation of workers is rampant. Just look at the pay differences between average and max at any company, and you'll see disparities that disprove that claim.
Pfft. If you had decent dna you'd be so rich the thousand dollars would be so meaningless to you that you'd do it just to have another diploma certifying your perfection on the wall.
Commenting on your sig: Did you hit calculate on every page? I also happened to get exactly 0.59 (well, 0.586), which made me suspicious, and caused me to discover that you have to hit the calculate button on every page in order not to get that apparent default.
Also, that page is pretty heavily biased. A lot of things they are calculating on are absolutely not settled science. The 'secondary' footprint page is particularly bad.
Still, if you're really at 0.59, that's pretty impressive. You don't drive, and your housing is solar powered, must be nice to have those kinds of resources.
Heh, where I live, people are wondering about the record mild fall we're having. With only ~25 days to go to winter, we haven't had a cold day yet, and only one half-hearted sprinkling of rain. Haven't had a november so mild in recorded history. If this is global warming, I'm all for it.
Why would anyone ever use anything but assembly? The rest is all syntactic sugar. Even if you need portability, you need only go as far as c.
More seriously, jruby is faster than cruby, and has nicer syntax than java. You would use it if you wanted to write code in a nice language on platforms where you would otherwise be stuck with java. Virtually anything that processes either plaintext or xml is going to be radically easier to implement in jruby than java, and nearly as fast at runtime.
Since no one has actually answered you yet, that would be network attached storage for sure. It's a rapidly increasingly popular way of providing backup and extended storage solution for home computers, as part of the home networking revolution.
The obvious alternative for the poster would be computer-attached storage, like a western digital mybook, which you can just carry around to each computer you want to back up once a week. The downside is obvious: you have to remember to back up each computer, which you can automate if you put the backup on the network.
I believe the tradition is that carbon neutral means into the air in modern times.
When you burn fossil fuels, you release carbon into the air that was not fixed into the fuel in modern times. So you release 'new' carbon into the air. Carbon positive.
When you burn these fuels, you re-release carbon into the air which was fixed in the last year. This is carbon neutral (no change to atmospheric carbon over short time horizon).
If you take some plants that have fixed some carbon and bury them under a continental fold, that's carbon negative.
It depends on the level of comfort you need to have with your release, and how quickly you can get there. I also work at a mid-sized company in the enterprise software business. We do a lot of automated testing. For an urgent, customer blocking issue, I could potentially:
1) get really lucky and diagnose the problem instantaneously. Realistically, it will take me at least one hour to properly diagnose any serious bug that escaped our qa process. 2) Make a fix. Assuming this is a fairly trivial fix, this can be done in minutes. 3) Submit fix to automated testing. Autotest turns around in about one hour. 4) Make a patch. This takes about 2 hours, as it requires an autobuild of the whole project plus some version control stuff. It can be done in parallel with the automated testing if the bug is sufficiently urgent. It might be conceivable that we could bypass our standard patch mechanism to speed things up, but we've never had a sufficiently urgent bug to do this in my knowledge.
So we can turn around a patch in about 3 hours (plus fix implementation time) if it was nightmarishly urgent. A more realistic turn around would be next day, which would allow time for us to run a manual qa pass, and to do a more thorough job of documenting and testing the bug (which in the given scenario would take place after shipping the fix).
What makes this at all possible is the high level of confidence we have in our automated testing. Our auto-tests cover our application surface really, really well, so passing auto test will give you a pretty high comfort level in giving something to a customer.
It would be a rather interesting question to ask what we might learn from searching for aliens that ultimately proved not to exist ala Columbus. And indeed, there might be a parallel, in that we might discover a bunch of new places to live (a la america) while searching for aliens (route to the orient).
Re:Meta to discussion: who is this "we" you speak
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
If we don't decide what is worthwhile, how will those who are incapable of deciding for themselves know what to do with their money? If we say that SETI is good and cancer research is bad, and we say it often enough, children will learn this and when they grow up and are captains of industry and need to give money to something to improve their image because they've just been found out as the moral-less scumbags that they are, they will give money to SETI, and collectively we'll all go 'oooh, good'. Or we could reverse that, and suggest that cancer research is more important. Collective judgement is very important. It's the very reason that a lot of green issues are being addressed right now, and why the younger you are, the more likely you are to think this is a good thing.
Other than the possibility that we are tasty, it would be far more efficient for them to wipe us out and grow cows and chickens instead, as we have already done a lot of work to build the infrastructure for producing meat efficiently from those sources. We're optimized more for producing fat from human sources, so I guess if the like the great taste of fat we might have a problem. Population reduction and slavery seem far more likely overall.
Most of the bigger development places will make at least a cursory check to see if you are actually listed in the credits for something you claimed to work on. If mobygames won't turn you up, for example, it may mean you get a question at the interview about what your contributions were and why you weren't credited.
You are not the audience for those credits. It's for the industry. When I hire, I care to know what games you've been credited on. Think of it as a resume issue.
Nope. The copyright laws have nothing to say on the matter. Credits aren't required at all, they're basically coerced into existence by the people who need them to prove the point for their resumes. I did work on 4 games for which I'm uncredited, and 2 for which I'm credited. The difference was all in my negotiating position for the 6 releases.
Having a good acronym was one of the reasons we picked the name 'world of warcraft'. There was even an email very near the start of development suggesting that anyone talking to the press/outside world should say 'wow' if they were going to abbreviate, to make sure that would catch on, and not 'wuhwuh (ww)'.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny but wrong, anyone who has ever eaten a human knows they are pretty much 100% dark meat (and not very tasty).
Reoffend and are caught and convicted! A very low percentage of these crimes reach that point, so a 8.5% reconviction rate within just 6 years is actually extremely high, and the bleeding hearts lose.
From the paper you cited:
Distinctions were drawn between reconvictions for sexual,
violent non-sexual and other offences. Tables 1 and 2 show
that 4.3% were reconvicted of a sexual offence within four
years of their release from prison; 8.5% within six years.
All these convictions resulted in a further lengthy custodial
sentence. When 'serious' violent offences (those resulting in
imprisonment) were added, the proportion reconvicted
rose to 9.3% within four years and 12.8% within six years.
The total percentage imprisoned for any offence was
12.8% within four years and 18.1% within six years.
Altogether, 23.5% and 30.9% were reconvicted of any
offence (whether imprisoned or not) by the end of the fourand
six-year follow-up periods.
The problem is that we have a severely confounded notion of what jail is for, is it:
1) to work off your debt to society
2) to punish you
3) to protect society from the likelihood you will misbehave again
4) to discourage others from misbehaving
5) to satisfy society's lust for vengeance
In the case of sex offenders, I believe most people are concerned with #3, and the problem is that the sentence terms aren't nearly long enough based on the rate of recidivism. These crimes should all carry life sentencing based on that premise alone, because there is no way to effectively decide who is safe to release, nor is there any therapy other than castration with reasonably proven efficacy.
You should consider adopting test first development, this will have numerous advantages for your situation:
"It is buggy, slow, fragile, and a nightmare to maintain."
1) Test first code isn't buggy. It has tests that prove the correctness for all important cases.
2) Test first code isn't fragile. It has tests that allow easy refactoring without risk of unknowingly breaking an important use case.
3) Test first code isn't a nightmare to maintain, for the same reason as #2. The tests also help to document the use cases in a way that comments frequently fail to do.
It won't do anything about slow, unless your test cases help to specify minimum performance levels. In which case it can solve that problem too.
As a coding practice, it has one main additional advantage: it has good empirical results, and that's sellable to management. Management likes good practices, particularly one you can sell as cutting costs in qa through automation.
Wow. Just wow.
The second part is assignment of inventions which is almost alway completely separate. Or at least it should be. If you are employed in a "creative" capacity where it is your job to come up with new things, do you honestly believe that you should have the right to (a) come up with something new that is within the scope of your job, (b) quit, and (c) form a new company to exploit this new idea?
If it's a non-patentable idea, then absolutely, yes. If it's patentable, there's no problem to begin with, as the first company has the paper trail to fight and win this in court. Assignment of IP created on the job is perfectly reasonable. But only that. Recreation of the IP off the job from knowledge is completely moral.
Sure, there are people that have tried to behave ethically and gotten screwed. But for every one of those there have been people that have lied, cheated and stole from their employer. And in my experience the far larger quantity has been on the side of unethical behavior.
If you believe that, you are either grossly underexperienced, or blind. Employer exploitation of workers is rampant. Just look at the pay differences between average and max at any company, and you'll see disparities that disprove that claim.
Why are people always so eager to boil complex situations down to a variance in a single variable in an attempt to prove a point?
They have an agenda, and it works?
I feel bad for people who live in countries where their insurance coverage can be dropped. Sorry friend.
Pfft. If you had decent dna you'd be so rich the thousand dollars would be so meaningless to you that you'd do it just to have another diploma certifying your perfection on the wall.
Commenting on your sig:
Did you hit calculate on every page? I also happened to get exactly 0.59 (well, 0.586), which made me suspicious, and caused me to discover that you have to hit the calculate button on every page in order not to get that apparent default.
Also, that page is pretty heavily biased. A lot of things they are calculating on are absolutely not settled science. The 'secondary' footprint page is particularly bad.
Still, if you're really at 0.59, that's pretty impressive. You don't drive, and your housing is solar powered, must be nice to have those kinds of resources.
Heh, where I live, people are wondering about the record mild fall we're having. With only ~25 days to go to winter, we haven't had a cold day yet, and only one half-hearted sprinkling of rain. Haven't had a november so mild in recorded history. If this is global warming, I'm all for it.
Why would anyone ever use anything but assembly? The rest is all syntactic sugar. Even if you need portability, you need only go as far as c.
More seriously, jruby is faster than cruby, and has nicer syntax than java. You would use it if you wanted to write code in a nice language on platforms where you would otherwise be stuck with java. Virtually anything that processes either plaintext or xml is going to be radically easier to implement in jruby than java, and nearly as fast at runtime.
Since no one has actually answered you yet, that would be network attached storage for sure. It's a rapidly increasingly popular way of providing backup and extended storage solution for home computers, as part of the home networking revolution.
The obvious alternative for the poster would be computer-attached storage, like a western digital mybook, which you can just carry around to each computer you want to back up once a week. The downside is obvious: you have to remember to back up each computer, which you can automate if you put the backup on the network.
It's clearly intended for young girls who want to grow up to be married to a billionaire. Definitely not for little Jimmy, unless of course, you know.
That is a fantastic meme mashup, thanks.
I believe the tradition is that carbon neutral means into the air in modern times.
When you burn fossil fuels, you release carbon into the air that was not fixed into the fuel in modern times. So you release 'new' carbon into the air. Carbon positive.
When you burn these fuels, you re-release carbon into the air which was fixed in the last year. This is carbon neutral (no change to atmospheric carbon over short time horizon).
If you take some plants that have fixed some carbon and bury them under a continental fold, that's carbon negative.
It depends on the level of comfort you need to have with your release, and how quickly you can get there.
I also work at a mid-sized company in the enterprise software business. We do a lot of automated testing. For an urgent, customer blocking issue, I could potentially:
1) get really lucky and diagnose the problem instantaneously. Realistically, it will take me at least one hour to properly diagnose any serious bug that escaped our qa process.
2) Make a fix. Assuming this is a fairly trivial fix, this can be done in minutes.
3) Submit fix to automated testing. Autotest turns around in about one hour.
4) Make a patch. This takes about 2 hours, as it requires an autobuild of the whole project plus some version control stuff. It can be done in parallel with the automated testing if the bug is sufficiently urgent. It might be conceivable that we could bypass our standard patch mechanism to speed things up, but we've never had a sufficiently urgent bug to do this in my knowledge.
So we can turn around a patch in about 3 hours (plus fix implementation time) if it was nightmarishly urgent. A more realistic turn around would be next day, which would allow time for us to run a manual qa pass, and to do a more thorough job of documenting and testing the bug (which in the given scenario would take place after shipping the fix).
What makes this at all possible is the high level of confidence we have in our automated testing. Our auto-tests cover our application surface really, really well, so passing auto test will give you a pretty high comfort level in giving something to a customer.
when your submarine detectors all have 'made in china' stamped on the bottom.
A 1024 byte hash is not large compared to the gigabyte file it signs.
It would be a rather interesting question to ask what we might learn from searching for aliens that ultimately proved not to exist ala Columbus. And indeed, there might be a parallel, in that we might discover a bunch of new places to live (a la america) while searching for aliens (route to the orient).
If we don't decide what is worthwhile, how will those who are incapable of deciding for themselves know what to do with their money? If we say that SETI is good and cancer research is bad, and we say it often enough, children will learn this and when they grow up and are captains of industry and need to give money to something to improve their image because they've just been found out as the moral-less scumbags that they are, they will give money to SETI, and collectively we'll all go 'oooh, good'. Or we could reverse that, and suggest that cancer research is more important. Collective judgement is very important. It's the very reason that a lot of green issues are being addressed right now, and why the younger you are, the more likely you are to think this is a good thing.
Other than the possibility that we are tasty, it would be far more efficient for them to wipe us out and grow cows and chickens instead, as we have already done a lot of work to build the infrastructure for producing meat efficiently from those sources. We're optimized more for producing fat from human sources, so I guess if the like the great taste of fat we might have a problem. Population reduction and slavery seem far more likely overall.
Most of the bigger development places will make at least a cursory check to see if you are actually listed in the credits for something you claimed to work on. If mobygames won't turn you up, for example, it may mean you get a question at the interview about what your contributions were and why you weren't credited.
You are not the audience for those credits. It's for the industry. When I hire, I care to know what games you've been credited on. Think of it as a resume issue.
Nope. The copyright laws have nothing to say on the matter. Credits aren't required at all, they're basically coerced into existence by the people who need them to prove the point for their resumes. I did work on 4 games for which I'm uncredited, and 2 for which I'm credited. The difference was all in my negotiating position for the 6 releases.
Having a good acronym was one of the reasons we picked the name 'world of warcraft'. There was even an email very near the start of development suggesting that anyone talking to the press/outside world should say 'wow' if they were going to abbreviate, to make sure that would catch on, and not 'wuhwuh (ww)'.