Explain to me again why more call centers are a good thing?
If people were not willing to pay for them, they would not exist. If people are willing to pay for them, they must provide some value. Note that this value could be purely psychological, like insurance (which is stupid mathematically).
The capitalist economy we have today bears little resemblance to the economic context in which Smith wrote The Wealth of Nation.
That doesn't matter--what Smith was describing were the fundamental rules of the universe. Newton's mathematics still hold, despite the fact that we have satellites, automobiles and television. Like Newton, Smith's system is incomplete and a mere approximation, but it is essentially correct.
In particular a purely market based system, which you would appear to be advocating, is by its very nature undemocratic.
First, I don't give a fig for democracy--I care about liberty. They are related but independent. Second, a market is extremely democratic: everyone gets 24 hours a day in which to work, spend and sleep. It's when the market is interfered with that it becomes undemocratic: when false incentives and disincentives are created; when false demand is instilled; when false supplies are produced. This is among the great problems of socialism: it causes to be done what no-one wants done (if they wanted it, they'd pay for it in the first place).
Hey, you have no right to a living.
That is not correct, at least not for a large section of the worlds population. Under European human rights laws, I have a "right" to a minimum standard of living, which is normally guaranteed by state welfare. Most people would agree that this is the civilised thing to do, unless you would like to see people literally dying of unemployment on the streets.
That's not a right--that's a state guarantee. Rights are inherent in being a man: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. One has a right to believe in one's God; one has the right to speak one's mind; one has a right to property; one has a right to bear arms; one has a right to be free. One does not have a right to steal (which is what welfare is: thieving from the rich and giving to the poor). The difference is that rights cost others nothing: I may not like your religion, your thoughts or the cut of your suit, but it hurts me not a whit. Entitlements do cost others: if you are guaranteed a minimum living, then someone's got to pay for it.
Now, this does not mean that I'm some sort of crazy Randian loony. Charity is a vitally important thing, and it is quite immoral not to help out those who are worse off. It is good for me to give $20 to a beggar; it is bad for me to clap a gun to your head and make you give him $20. The former is voluntary; the latter is compulsory. The former is charity; the latter is socialism.
Being paid more to work less, is essentially what economic progress is about. I no longer have to grow my own food and till my own fields, arguably I have it rather easy, yet I can afford a nice flat and technology beyond the wildest dreams of somebody only 50 years ago.
That's not it at all. Economic progress is driven by this simple engine: in every free exchange, each party is better off than before. If I purchase a pack of gum for a quarter, I have gotten something more than a quarter's worth of gum, satisfaction & chewing enjoyment--otherwise I wouldn't have bought that gum (if I got but 24 cents' worth, I'd be stupid to pay 25). So if I got more than a quarter's worth, then the seller must have been cheated, right? No--he's better off too. That gum was worth less to him than it was to me; he would rather have the quarter than the gum, and I would rather have the gum than the quarter. Both our lives are now better.
Now, multiply this effect over the billions of transactions going on every day between billions of people. Everyone is constantly becoming better and better off. Slowly but surely each of our lives is improved. Due to steadily increasing economies, we are each able to command resources the greatest emperors of the past could not even imagine doing. Food from around the globe; raw materials to make computers, clot
Who does not shop for the best prices on groceries?
Organic eggs from free range chickens cost more. I still buy them.
Yet if one store sells the same eggs for $5/dozen that another sells for $10/dozen, which are you going to buy? Certainly, one pays more for more. Why would you pay more for less? That's what one does when one hires Westerners: we work less, we're less dedicated and we demand more benefits. Out employers pay more for less; naturally they want a better deal. The great thing is that this a) improves the lot of the cheaper foreigners and b) forces us to be competitive.
I'm not putting down Westerners--I certainly enjoy my 40-60 hours/week, retire-at-60 lifestyle. I just don't pretend that I'm entitled to it.
See, folks, this isn't about helping out poor countries, this is about making corporations rich.
One would think that more than two centuries after The Wealth of Nations was published this sort of dark, superstitious nonsense would have been extinguished by the light of reason. Sadly such is not the case.
The beauty of a market is, provided that fraud is not allowed, the greed of all paradoxically leads to the betterment of all. Yes, the corporation wishes to spend less, and so goes with a cheaper supplier of the same good. Well, guess what--that's better. If B can produce the same as A for less, then it is a waste of one's money to use A; it's also a waste of A's time. Going with the cheaper supplier rewards those who do more with less; it is economical.
You know this, I'm certain. Who does not shop for the best prices on groceries? Why is it bad for an employer to shop for the best prices on labour? Of course it's not.
There is the law of comparative advantage to keep in mind as well. If A is better at X and B is better at Y, then it is best for A to devote all his time to X and B to devote all his time to Y; this ends up yielding far more of both X and Y than otherwise. If India is better at call-centre staffing at the US is better at R & D or at finance, then it is best for India to focus on call centres and the US to focus on R & D or finance. This yields more call centres (a good thing) and more research or financing (also a good thing).
The message in return being sent to Americans isn't,"Thanks for helping us get to where we are.", but instead was, "Other countries are out-competing us, you better start working more hours." Of course, what they don't state explicitly, is that you are simply competing with another branch of your employer in a different country.
Hey, you have no right to a living. Why should anyone pay you more to work less? It's insane, like buying lettuce for $50/head. That's what competition is about. It's rough, but that's Real Life.
If you are running a corporate meail[sic] server and are not filtering for known executable extensions, you are a fucking idiot. Period. There is just no excuse to EVER allow unfiltered mail through.
Really? What if one's corporation is running Unix only? Perhaps.pif stands for personel information format at one's company. Perhaps one's corporation has a strict no-lusers policy.
I prefer my mail feed unfiltered. I'll accept SpamAssassin mangling, but that's about it.
It's not slave labour--it's a contract, and in fact for most people a good one. Most folks don't produce anything outside of work, and the extra $1,000 or $5,000 a year their employers pay just in case they have an idea is worth it to them. It's the folks who do have ideas that want to have their cakes and eat them too: they want to be free to own the idea and get paid by their employers to come up with them.
The fundamental idea of a contract (of any free transaction, really) is that both parties are better off than they were before. You're better off with the $1,000; your company is better off with the idea. If either of you didn't wish to be a party, he could have refused to sign.
1 pint of water is supposed to weigh 1 pound. The volume is based on a cylinder rather than a cube, and thus is an ugly number of inches. Oh, and your water-heating example is all wrong. The watt is 1 J/s. A Joule is.288459 calories (beautiful conversion, eh?); a calorie is the amount of energy required to raise 1 gram of water 1 Celsius degree. Thus a kettle running at 1 J/s could heat.288459 grams of water 1 degree per second, or one gram one degree every 4.1868 seconds. A kettle running at 3,000 J/s (3 kilowatts) would thus be able to heat 3L (3 kilograms; 3,000 grams) 1 degree in 4.1868 seconds--more than four times as long.
This just goes to show that this kind of thing is rather trickier than you might think. Or than I think, probably--no doubt I've screwed up some part of the above equation:-)
Yeah, that's kinda my point. Homes, driveways, roofs & lawns are not squares. Water heaters are not cubes. Once pi is introduced into an equation, all those pretty equivalents are useless anyway. 28.27431 cubic yards is no prettier than 21.617261 cubic metres.
My point stands--almost no-one needs to convert gallons to acre-feet, and certainly not in his head.
Instead of focusing on what we don't do, the real system focuses on what we do do. It's easy to physically cut a foot into inches, or a gallon into cups, or a yard into feet, or a pound into ounces. Try estimating a litre into decilitres--good luck.
I'd much rather be using the metric system - I hate having to do all the conversions with a pencil and paper instead of just moving a decimal point.
Really, how often do you do that? In real life, unless one is in certain fields, It Just Doesn't Come Up. And in those fields, problems are rarely quite so simple: square areas and cubical volumes are pretty dashed rare.
Try converting Joules to calories sometime, for that matter...
Maybe the 2% of the population that won't or can't open IE just closes those windows and goes elsewhere, but that's something I just won't do--I use browsers to see content, I don't select content based on the brand of browser I run.
Yeah, well I'm one of that 2%. Why should I bother to read a site which cannot be bothered to present its content properly? It's not content unless I can read it. I feel the same about broken email clients and servers which do not follow the proper standards. Web browsers are no different.
If Microsoft produced an incompatible TCP/IP stack, I wouldn't switch to them in order to talk to their machines--I'd ignore them.
Let 'em. They'll waste their money on an incredibly uneconomic expense, and we'll meanwhile invest in ventures which will actually pay off. Really, think about it: outer space just doesn't make any sense at this point in time. What resources are there to be utilised? How can the expense be justified? It can't. Let them waste their resources; it can only make us better off in comparison.
IIRC `midget' and `dwarf' apply to different maladies. One is a fully-scaled miniature (rarer than the other, perhaps?), while the other has a normal sized head, smaller torso and very small arms and legs (a lot of the folks in Willow were of that type, I believe). I forget which is which, though. Perhaps you know?
According to Microsoft, RemoveDirectory() removes the directory specifed in a C string. The directory must be empty, exactly as with the POSIX rmdir(). The return value is 0 if unsuccessful, non-zero otherwise; this is the opposite of rmdir(). So, it's better to replace that snippet with:
The decimal system is broken (ten is a severely bad number to use as a base); French units are incredibly broken; POSIX described what already existed; and TCP/IP was a hack before it was a standard. In factg, of your examples, the only one which was created by committee was the system of French units, which pretty much proves the article's point--that standards committees create crap.
If we let the market handle everything, there'd be no need for bribing the government. Corporations would do whatever they wanted to, and we'd be working 12 hours a day for starvation wages.
Only if that's what you want to do. If there is perfect competition for labour and employment, then labour practices will reflect what people are willing to do.
It's called a `gap.' It's a way of allowing mediated access to a public resource from a private segment. Essentially, the tech has two workstations: one on the private internet and one on the public Internet. He takes requests from the private side, researches them on the public side, and then returns the results.
Note that this doesn't protect against an evil mediator--other procedures must guard against that.
But an ice pick, yeah, that'll probably go right through.
Sounds like, IIRC, a poniard. That was a mediaeval dagger designed to punch through armour--a man can slam one through a garbage dumpster. Anyway, seems to me that that might be a useful thing to have on one's person, should one be fighting Kevlar-armoured men.
I apologise for that--it was quite nasty. Really, the reason I changed the title was more as humour than as aught else. I was snarky at the end of my post, and did not exercise the self-control I should have. Sorry.
It's still amazing to me how some folks have such absurd ideas about how usual and normal humans are. It seems obvious to anyone who looks around himself that we are as far above any other animal as the sky is above the sea.
What animal has free will? What animal can split the atom? What animal is loved by God? What animal can build an engine? What animal can love? What animal can speak? What animal can appreciate beauty? What animal can write poetry? What animal other than man is the utter pinnacle of all creation?
The answer, of course, is none. We build, we think, we feel, we pray, we ponder, we engineer, we learn: in short, we are men. No chimpanzee, no rabbit, no dog, no swine, no fish nor foul does any of these things in any more than an utterly rudimentary fashion, and none do all of them.
Not to belittle beasts: what they do, they are good at. But they are in no way our equals: they do not even approach our greatness, any more than a spark approaches the glory of the sun.
Oh please...the fact is, killing another human being is murder. Period.
I don't disagree: it is murder to kill a man for his wallet; murder to kill a man for killing a man for his wallet; murder to kill a man in self defense. In each case one has slain a fellow human being, and in each case one's soul is stained. And yet there is a difference. All murder is wrong--but not all murder is equally wrong. In fact, as with many things, sometimes it is necessary to do one wrong thing rather than another. It is better to kill a man than let him kill one; it is better to starve to death (and thus kill oneself) than to kill another man for food; and it is better to kill certain criminals than to let them live.
We live in a fallen world, and sometimes we must do a little wrong rather than allow a yet worse wrong to take place. Why should slaying another be a ticket to free room, board and clothing for life? What sort of perverse incentive does that set up? Why should raping and murdering a ten year old be unpunished (in comparison to the crime, in several ways life isn't punishment)?
For that matter, why don't you also consider fines and imprisonment vengeance? They are, after all: that's what punishment is. It's not to change behaviour; it's certainly not to deter other criminals (although both those may be salutory side-effects). Punishment is applying the appropriate consequence to the commitor of a crime--which is to say, it's vengeance. For some crimes it means stealing his money; for others it means taking his liberty; for yet other it means taking his life.
Incidentally, the `you can't give it back' argument doesn't ring true: nor can you give back a man the years in prison he spends. In fact, I consider it rather less humane to keep a man in prison for forty years instead of killing him quickly.
Regarding the possibility of false conviction: that is present in any system of punishment possible. We do our absolute best to prevent it from happening: indeed every aspect of our system is meant to ensure that the innocent man has a chance, even at the risk that the guilty man might walk free. Yes, innocent men are fined; yes, innocent men are imprisoned; and yes, innocent men are executed. That's unavoidable. But we keep that number as low as humanly possible.
Incidentally, the response to "mod parent down" because you didn't like what I had to say speaks much to[sic] clearly about the state of things in the US. Better to suppress an unpopular opinion than have to listen to something you disagree with, eh?
Why not mod you down? You're wrong--while you certainly have the right to write as you will (and others have the right to read you, if they will), the whole basis of moderation is that some folks find some opinions are less worth reading than others, and that yet others are willing to abide by said finding. A post which derides the death penalty (and hence implicitly argues an absurd point, that it's better to coddle malefactors than punish them), and which argues that Americans would logically support rape as a form of punishment, is simply not worth reading, or wasting bandwidth to transmit, unless the reader is bound-and-determined to read nonsense, as is his right.
Those self-described `hackers' of the 80s were just that: self-described. They were kiddie who wanted to be like their betters, the real hackers, who were non-malicious programmers. The word `hacker' was first used in computing circles to mean, well, a hacker--only later was it corrupted by puerile crackers and a lackwit media.
Boo-hoo-hoo. So several of our states allow capital punishment. Certain crimes merit capital punishment. E.g. the Floridian recently executed: he slew a man, his pregnant wife, their children and ripped the child from her womb and mutilated him. I suppose the `enlightened' thing to do would be to feed and clothe him for the rest of his life?
Go to the Texas death row site and state that those crimes don't deserve death. Bruce Jacobs, executed on Thursday, broke into a home and stabbed a 16 year old boy to death in 1986 in front of the kid's parents. Roger Vaughn, executed on the sixth of this month, raped and strangled a 66 year old woman in 1991. John Chavez, executed in April, shot and killed a man for that man's wallet. And so on and so forth.
Well, we use it pretty heavily where I work (folks scattered all over the country, you see), and I find it annoying that our customer doesn't use the same system. So having access to global, rather than simply local, `instant messaging' systems would be nice.
But you, you don't even support your dismissal with arguments, just spout off like, well, an elitist asshole.
What many folks don't realise is that a certain amount of education makes it very difficult for one to even argue with the uneducated. As an example, we all know that the world is round. There is no need to argue the fact. Now, along comes some rube who believes that it's flat, and he complains that one sounds like an `elitist asshole' by simply stating that the earth is round, and not bothering to demonstrate it.
Likewise, it may very well be (I won't argue for or against, myself) that, to one with a semi-decent grounding in philosophy, it is laughable to laud The Matrix for its presentation of philosophy. I do know that I have often found in those realms where I am informed that it is well-nigh impossible to discuss them with those who are not, simply because we share no common vocabulary, no common reference point, no meeting ground on which we can speak.
Yes, perl is better than C for several things. Beets are rather better tasting than exrement, but they are not in the class of, say, sushi or ice cream. So too perl, while better for some things than some languages, is very poor at other things, compared to other languages (most particularly Lisp, IMHO). Also, the 100+ line C function should, if possible, be written more cleanly anyway--done right, it should look very much like the perl function.
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If people were not willing to pay for them, they would not exist. If people are willing to pay for them, they must provide some value. Note that this value could be purely psychological, like insurance (which is stupid mathematically).
That doesn't matter--what Smith was describing were the fundamental rules of the universe. Newton's mathematics still hold, despite the fact that we have satellites, automobiles and television. Like Newton, Smith's system is incomplete and a mere approximation, but it is essentially correct.
In particular a purely market based system, which you would appear to be advocating, is by its very nature undemocratic.
First, I don't give a fig for democracy--I care about liberty. They are related but independent. Second, a market is extremely democratic: everyone gets 24 hours a day in which to work, spend and sleep. It's when the market is interfered with that it becomes undemocratic: when false incentives and disincentives are created; when false demand is instilled; when false supplies are produced. This is among the great problems of socialism: it causes to be done what no-one wants done (if they wanted it, they'd pay for it in the first place).
That's not a right--that's a state guarantee. Rights are inherent in being a man: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. One has a right to believe in one's God; one has the right to speak one's mind; one has a right to property; one has a right to bear arms; one has a right to be free. One does not have a right to steal (which is what welfare is: thieving from the rich and giving to the poor). The difference is that rights cost others nothing: I may not like your religion, your thoughts or the cut of your suit, but it hurts me not a whit. Entitlements do cost others: if you are guaranteed a minimum living, then someone's got to pay for it.
Now, this does not mean that I'm some sort of crazy Randian loony. Charity is a vitally important thing, and it is quite immoral not to help out those who are worse off. It is good for me to give $20 to a beggar; it is bad for me to clap a gun to your head and make you give him $20. The former is voluntary; the latter is compulsory. The former is charity; the latter is socialism.
Being paid more to work less, is essentially what economic progress is about. I no longer have to grow my own food and till my own fields, arguably I have it rather easy, yet I can afford a nice flat and technology beyond the wildest dreams of somebody only 50 years ago.
That's not it at all. Economic progress is driven by this simple engine: in every free exchange, each party is better off than before. If I purchase a pack of gum for a quarter, I have gotten something more than a quarter's worth of gum, satisfaction & chewing enjoyment--otherwise I wouldn't have bought that gum (if I got but 24 cents' worth, I'd be stupid to pay 25). So if I got more than a quarter's worth, then the seller must have been cheated, right? No--he's better off too. That gum was worth less to him than it was to me; he would rather have the quarter than the gum, and I would rather have the gum than the quarter. Both our lives are now better.
Now, multiply this effect over the billions of transactions going on every day between billions of people. Everyone is constantly becoming better and better off. Slowly but surely each of our lives is improved. Due to steadily increasing economies, we are each able to command resources the greatest emperors of the past could not even imagine doing. Food from around the globe; raw materials to make computers, clot
Yet if one store sells the same eggs for $5/dozen that another sells for $10/dozen, which are you going to buy? Certainly, one pays more for more. Why would you pay more for less? That's what one does when one hires Westerners: we work less, we're less dedicated and we demand more benefits. Out employers pay more for less; naturally they want a better deal. The great thing is that this a) improves the lot of the cheaper foreigners and b) forces us to be competitive.
I'm not putting down Westerners--I certainly enjoy my 40-60 hours/week, retire-at-60 lifestyle. I just don't pretend that I'm entitled to it.
One would think that more than two centuries after The Wealth of Nations was published this sort of dark, superstitious nonsense would have been extinguished by the light of reason. Sadly such is not the case.
The beauty of a market is, provided that fraud is not allowed, the greed of all paradoxically leads to the betterment of all. Yes, the corporation wishes to spend less, and so goes with a cheaper supplier of the same good. Well, guess what--that's better. If B can produce the same as A for less, then it is a waste of one's money to use A; it's also a waste of A's time. Going with the cheaper supplier rewards those who do more with less; it is economical.
You know this, I'm certain. Who does not shop for the best prices on groceries? Why is it bad for an employer to shop for the best prices on labour? Of course it's not.
There is the law of comparative advantage to keep in mind as well. If A is better at X and B is better at Y, then it is best for A to devote all his time to X and B to devote all his time to Y; this ends up yielding far more of both X and Y than otherwise. If India is better at call-centre staffing at the US is better at R & D or at finance, then it is best for India to focus on call centres and the US to focus on R & D or finance. This yields more call centres (a good thing) and more research or financing (also a good thing).
The message in return being sent to Americans isn't,"Thanks for helping us get to where we are.", but instead was, "Other countries are out-competing us, you better start working more hours." Of course, what they don't state explicitly, is that you are simply competing with another branch of your employer in a different country.
Hey, you have no right to a living. Why should anyone pay you more to work less? It's insane, like buying lettuce for $50/head. That's what competition is about. It's rough, but that's Real Life.
Really? What if one's corporation is running Unix only? Perhaps .pif stands for personel information format at one's company. Perhaps one's corporation has a strict no-lusers policy.
I prefer my mail feed unfiltered. I'll accept SpamAssassin mangling, but that's about it.
The fundamental idea of a contract (of any free transaction, really) is that both parties are better off than they were before. You're better off with the $1,000; your company is better off with the idea. If either of you didn't wish to be a party, he could have refused to sign.
This just goes to show that this kind of thing is rather trickier than you might think. Or than I think, probably--no doubt I've screwed up some part of the above equation:-)
My point stands--almost no-one needs to convert gallons to acre-feet, and certainly not in his head.
Instead of focusing on what we don't do, the real system focuses on what we do do. It's easy to physically cut a foot into inches, or a gallon into cups, or a yard into feet, or a pound into ounces. Try estimating a litre into decilitres--good luck.
Really, how often do you do that? In real life, unless one is in certain fields, It Just Doesn't Come Up. And in those fields, problems are rarely quite so simple: square areas and cubical volumes are pretty dashed rare.
Try converting Joules to calories sometime, for that matter...
Yeah, well I'm one of that 2%. Why should I bother to read a site which cannot be bothered to present its content properly? It's not content unless I can read it. I feel the same about broken email clients and servers which do not follow the proper standards. Web browsers are no different.
If Microsoft produced an incompatible TCP/IP stack, I wouldn't switch to them in order to talk to their machines--I'd ignore them.
Let 'em. They'll waste their money on an incredibly uneconomic expense, and we'll meanwhile invest in ventures which will actually pay off. Really, think about it: outer space just doesn't make any sense at this point in time. What resources are there to be utilised? How can the expense be justified? It can't. Let them waste their resources; it can only make us better off in comparison.
IIRC `midget' and `dwarf' apply to different maladies. One is a fully-scaled miniature (rarer than the other, perhaps?), while the other has a normal sized head, smaller torso and very small arms and legs (a lot of the folks in Willow were of that type, I believe). I forget which is which, though. Perhaps you know?
The decimal system is broken (ten is a severely bad number to use as a base); French units are incredibly broken; POSIX described what already existed; and TCP/IP was a hack before it was a standard. In factg, of your examples, the only one which was created by committee was the system of French units, which pretty much proves the article's point--that standards committees create crap.
Only if that's what you want to do. If there is perfect competition for labour and employment, then labour practices will reflect what people are willing to do.
Note that this doesn't protect against an evil mediator--other procedures must guard against that.
Sounds like, IIRC, a poniard. That was a mediaeval dagger designed to punch through armour--a man can slam one through a garbage dumpster. Anyway, seems to me that that might be a useful thing to have on one's person, should one be fighting Kevlar-armoured men.
I apologise for that--it was quite nasty. Really, the reason I changed the title was more as humour than as aught else. I was snarky at the end of my post, and did not exercise the self-control I should have. Sorry.
What animal has free will? What animal can split the atom? What animal is loved by God? What animal can build an engine? What animal can love? What animal can speak? What animal can appreciate beauty? What animal can write poetry? What animal other than man is the utter pinnacle of all creation?
The answer, of course, is none. We build, we think, we feel, we pray, we ponder, we engineer, we learn: in short, we are men. No chimpanzee, no rabbit, no dog, no swine, no fish nor foul does any of these things in any more than an utterly rudimentary fashion, and none do all of them.
Not to belittle beasts: what they do, they are good at. But they are in no way our equals: they do not even approach our greatness, any more than a spark approaches the glory of the sun.
I don't disagree: it is murder to kill a man for his wallet; murder to kill a man for killing a man for his wallet; murder to kill a man in self defense. In each case one has slain a fellow human being, and in each case one's soul is stained. And yet there is a difference. All murder is wrong--but not all murder is equally wrong. In fact, as with many things, sometimes it is necessary to do one wrong thing rather than another. It is better to kill a man than let him kill one; it is better to starve to death (and thus kill oneself) than to kill another man for food; and it is better to kill certain criminals than to let them live.
We live in a fallen world, and sometimes we must do a little wrong rather than allow a yet worse wrong to take place. Why should slaying another be a ticket to free room, board and clothing for life? What sort of perverse incentive does that set up? Why should raping and murdering a ten year old be unpunished (in comparison to the crime, in several ways life isn't punishment)?
For that matter, why don't you also consider fines and imprisonment vengeance? They are, after all: that's what punishment is. It's not to change behaviour; it's certainly not to deter other criminals (although both those may be salutory side-effects). Punishment is applying the appropriate consequence to the commitor of a crime--which is to say, it's vengeance. For some crimes it means stealing his money; for others it means taking his liberty; for yet other it means taking his life.
Incidentally, the `you can't give it back' argument doesn't ring true: nor can you give back a man the years in prison he spends. In fact, I consider it rather less humane to keep a man in prison for forty years instead of killing him quickly.
Regarding the possibility of false conviction: that is present in any system of punishment possible. We do our absolute best to prevent it from happening: indeed every aspect of our system is meant to ensure that the innocent man has a chance, even at the risk that the guilty man might walk free. Yes, innocent men are fined; yes, innocent men are imprisoned; and yes, innocent men are executed. That's unavoidable. But we keep that number as low as humanly possible.
Incidentally, the response to "mod parent down" because you didn't like what I had to say speaks much to[sic] clearly about the state of things in the US. Better to suppress an unpopular opinion than have to listen to something you disagree with, eh?
Why not mod you down? You're wrong--while you certainly have the right to write as you will (and others have the right to read you, if they will), the whole basis of moderation is that some folks find some opinions are less worth reading than others, and that yet others are willing to abide by said finding. A post which derides the death penalty (and hence implicitly argues an absurd point, that it's better to coddle malefactors than punish them), and which argues that Americans would logically support rape as a form of punishment, is simply not worth reading, or wasting bandwidth to transmit, unless the reader is bound-and-determined to read nonsense, as is his right.
Those self-described `hackers' of the 80s were just that: self-described. They were kiddie who wanted to be like their betters, the real hackers, who were non-malicious programmers. The word `hacker' was first used in computing circles to mean, well, a hacker--only later was it corrupted by puerile crackers and a lackwit media.
Go to the Texas death row site and state that those crimes don't deserve death. Bruce Jacobs, executed on Thursday, broke into a home and stabbed a 16 year old boy to death in 1986 in front of the kid's parents. Roger Vaughn, executed on the sixth of this month, raped and strangled a 66 year old woman in 1991. John Chavez, executed in April, shot and killed a man for that man's wallet. And so on and so forth.
Well, we use it pretty heavily where I work (folks scattered all over the country, you see), and I find it annoying that our customer doesn't use the same system. So having access to global, rather than simply local, `instant messaging' systems would be nice.
What many folks don't realise is that a certain amount of education makes it very difficult for one to even argue with the uneducated. As an example, we all know that the world is round. There is no need to argue the fact. Now, along comes some rube who believes that it's flat, and he complains that one sounds like an `elitist asshole' by simply stating that the earth is round, and not bothering to demonstrate it.
Likewise, it may very well be (I won't argue for or against, myself) that, to one with a semi-decent grounding in philosophy, it is laughable to laud The Matrix for its presentation of philosophy. I do know that I have often found in those realms where I am informed that it is well-nigh impossible to discuss them with those who are not, simply because we share no common vocabulary, no common reference point, no meeting ground on which we can speak.
Yes, perl is better than C for several things. Beets are rather better tasting than exrement, but they are not in the class of, say, sushi or ice cream. So too perl, while better for some things than some languages, is very poor at other things, compared to other languages (most particularly Lisp, IMHO). Also, the 100+ line C function should, if possible, be written more cleanly anyway--done right, it should look very much like the perl function.