Second time was for being a smartass to the prison shrink.
Have you considered lodging a complaint against this guy? The use of psychological torture in a situation like this might well qualify him for professional sanctions.
[3] - Technically, life in prison works, in that they don't commit any more crimes
That is an assumption you are making, and it's a bad one. Not only do criminals continue to do the obvious in-prison crimes like assault on other prisoners and guards, they actually participate in out-of-prison crimes through the development of gang networks, which is greatly facilitated by prisons, particularly dangerous ones where an individual needs protection.
That's not engineering, it's wishful thinking. Which is not to say it is *wrong*, just unjustified.
The system is designed to be in static equilibrium, so it is by no means guaranteed that the kind of results you are envisioning are the only possible alternatives.
The issue isn't where peoples' eyes are pointed. The issue is what people will actually see.
It's one thing to move the clock, gas tank gauge and speedometer up so it appears to float over the road. It's another to do the same thing with a book, a work document or a sports game.
Stuff that only requires brief attention and is relevant to the operation of the car is perfectly safe, which is why it's OK when it is set down in the dashboard, away from your view of the road. The audio system is less relevant to the operation of the car and can take more attention for longer as you look for what you want. People *do* get into accidents because they take too much time fiddling with their radio instead of looking at the road. But that's behavior you can guard against.
Something that takes the driver's focus off driving is bound to be bad, even if it is optimally placed in his field of vision.
Your example raises an interesting point in that the justification to refuse to serve the KKK is arguably *less* than refusing to serve a gay couple. A cake is not an instrument of violence and oppression, unless the Klan starts leaving sinister cakes instead of burning crosses on people's lawns. A gay wedding cake is actually about redefining what has been the recent cultural norm for marriages.
I actually think that if this law were only confined to fancy cakes and photographers, it wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunate, perhaps, but people can bake their own cakes and take their own pictures if need be. What I'm concerned about is the cumulative effect of *any* kind of business being denied to people on the basis of their private behavior and beliefs.
For example imagine a gay couple living in a small Arizona town. The local grocery store won't sell to them, so they have to drive fifty miles to shop at Walmart. Then their car breaks down and the local mechanic won't fix it. If you like for "gay" substitute "atheist", "Mormon", or "black" if you like. It's one thing not to associate with people you disapprove of, it's another to drive them out of town. To live in a place you need to be able to purchase goods and services.
The law can't make us like each other, nor should it try, but it should enable us at a minimum to live together in peace and order.
One of the things I don't see discussed much is the potential failure modes for such a system.
My wife is a physical oceanographer, and one of the failure modes for instruments deployed on cables from a ship is a 'wuzzle' -- a large tangle of steel cable. Given the nature of the stuff, a length of cable that fits nicely in a spool on deck can twist itself into a knot larger than the ship.
So one thing I'd like to know is what are the potential hazards a couple thousand miles of elevator cable falling to the Earth's surface? Could we end up with tangles miles in diameter?
I think a space elevator is a great idea if it's feasible, provided that in the criteria for "feasible" we include being prepared for the conceivable ways the project could fail.
Subjectively, the bike becomes comfortable when it feels like an extension of your body. It's natural to shift around and be loose rather than stiff. If you were running you'd naturally move around obstacles or change your gait.
"Because all the partners want to gain experience from building ITER for what could be a lucrative future industry, the ITER agreement carves up the construction of reactor components among partners, each of which has created a “domestic agency” to handle the contracts. The result is far from efficient: Superconducting cable for the reactor’s magnets is manufactured in six different nations and the 5000-tonne vacuum vessel is being built partly in Korea and partly in Europe."
Remind you of any super-costly projects in the US?
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is way over budget and behind schedule. This is no doubt partly due to the ambitious goals of the project, but the fact that it employees 35000 people carefully spread over the majority of congressional districts in the country might also contribute. It's hard enough to do the nearly impossible without having to budget proof the project by doing it in an extravagantly complicated way.
Depends on the number of hours you put in the saddle. If you just ride an hour or two on the weekend, then a cushy seat and upright posture feels comfortable. If you ride many more hours per week it's a prescription for saddle sores and cut off circulation near the tops of your femurs.
If you ride a lot, you get used to the drop handlebars, which afford a number of small but significant changes in posture over a long ride, and allow you to use more of your body muscles (along with cleated shoes). Also with drop handlebars you support more of your weight on your hands and legs, so no manhood problems. When I was riding over a hundred miles per week, I found the most comfortable saddle was hard plastic with no padding at all.
You can certainly add a conversion kit to a frame of your choice -- they're out there for well under $1000.
I think the reason for the upgright position is that it appeals to people without any experience bikes. I suspect that's the target market: people who find the idea of bikes appealing but are intimidated by being the motor.
I used to be a regular bike commuter riding about 120-150 miles/week, but when I got a job with a 100+ mile round trip commute I gave it up. When I turned 50 I hadn't been on a bike in fifteen years and confess I did some thinking about an electric bike as a way to get back into it. Instead I bought a folding bike with the idea I could mix public transit and cycling, only to discover, low and behold, that despite being older and fatter, my legs still work well enough. Soon I was going on twenty or thirty mile rides with no motor assist wanted, even on the hills. Young people may blast by me on the hills, but one of the bonuses of age is I don't give a damn as long as I'm having fun.
Well, it fits the picture of someone who's interested in crypto -- the kind of person who'd get involved with crypto-currency. There's nothing wrong with doing a proof of concept, but relying on roll-your-own crypto is a bad idea unless you have other people with serious experience reviewing your work.
People who grew up recently in American suburbs often have little experience of what a working city is like.
Traffic and parking aren't a problem in a densely populated city because most trips that would be taken by car in the suburbs are taken on foot, sometimes with the subway. The total amount of crime is much higher in cities, but much of that difference disappears when you look at crime per capita. A lot of that crime is concentrated in failing cities; a successful big city tends to have lower crime because there are people around and because of the high concentration of police. Concentration is *good* for safety. New York City has a property crime rate half of Riverside California or Phoenix, AZ, and 1/3 that of Oklahoma City or Wichita, KS. It has half as many rapes per capita as sprawling San Jose or 1/3 of Corpus Christi and 1/6 of Colorado Springs.
Visit Manhattan if you haven't and spent a couple of days. The fact that everything is so busy, practically around the clock, is what makes NYC one the safest major cities to live in. It's even reasonably safe to stroll through Central Park after dark on a fine summer evening, because so many other people are doing it.
It's *abandonment* that makes cities dangerous; so crime is not a reasonable justification for abandoning cities. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Assange is a dick. Therefore murdering journalists is ok.
There is no logical connection between the two.
I agree there's no connection but that's a strawman argument. So far as I know nobody is advocating that position.
One actual argument might be that Assange is a loose cannon, therefore he should not have access to peoples' secrets. That's not necessarily an irrational thing to believe, but we *do* have to weigh that against what the secrets actually *say* -- particularly state secrets. Any reasonable, impartial person would have to admit that it's better to have *some* state secrets in the hands of a loose cannon than to allow them to remain secret.
My point is that Assange's character is a very important issue given the sensitivity of the role he's appointed himself to. That doesn't mean we have to be simple-minded about that and draw irrelevant ad hominem conclusions about what the government is up to. Assange's character is certainly relevant to the question of whether he's a suitable broker of whistleblower secrets.
The best argument in Assange's favor is, in my opinion, that so far as we know nothing disastrous has happened as a result of his activities. Unless you count embarassment, which I do not.
Well, judging from TFA, they are cutting spending for FY 2015 to 496 bln, then raising it to 535, 545 and $559 bln in following years. That means if you deduct the wartime finding for Iran and Afghanistan, the baseline spending level will be back to pre-sequester levels, and as much as the next seven countries in defense spending rank put together.
Not that spending is at all a measure of how much defense we get. One of the things the budget does is it retires the A10 Warthog attack plane which costs less than $18K/flight hour to operate and replaces it with the F-35, which is currently *promised* to cost $32K/flight hour, if it ever becomes combat ready.
I recently did some literature research into ontology technology, and was shocked by how many papers were pot-boilers that disguised trivial ideas with inflated language. These were papers that had absolutely no discernible academic value other than to pad a resume, and collect but a smattering of citations, mostly from similar papers. In comparison the seminal papers, the ones that get tons of citations for years to come are robust, thought-provoking and well-written.
Granted the well-written part probably has something to do with attracting future citations, but I think the trivial nature of the useless papers probably has something to do with their obscure style.
My wife went to public school in Massachusetts in the 1960s and 1970s and in her town they taught personal finance as part of the curriculum. I think a lot of that kind of forward thinking went out with ed reform, which focused on more traditional academic subjects. Massachusetts was early on the ed reform bandwagon, and consequently our students perennially top the nation in math, science and reading scores in the past decade. It sounds like the Mass DoE is looking for a way to shoehorn back in some of the content that got squeezed out.
If you're a bad carpenter, I suppose a powerful saw could make you a worse one. At least it allows you to make a bigger mess.
I've been a programmer for over thirty years now. When I started out, programming was about figuring out how to do things. Now it's much more about figuring out how to get someone else's code to do something. This shift was probably inevitable, as we try to get systems to do more and more. Very few of us have the luxury of being able to get away with just reading section 2 and 3 of the Unix manual; now we need to work with frameworks.
It's not like back in the day when you could code your own alternative to qsort as long as it worked; working with a framework's facilities is mandatory if you want the framework to do all the magical under-the-cover things it is supposed to do. We used to read the Unix manuals cover to cover from section 1 (commands) to section 7 (special files). Compilation and linking takes forever on a CPU running in the single digit MHz range, so we had plenty of time on our hands. That small but complete knowledge set, plus emacs, and we were cooking with gas.
These days you'd need to have loads more *static* knowledge to really know the APIs you're working with.So having things like pop-up parameter entry and a manual for the framework integrated into the IDE is nice.
But for me, the thing that finally got me away from emacsfor good was refactoring support in IDEs. And that's where the power saw analogy comes in. Refactoring is powerful, but it's also possible to drop down the refactoring rabbit hole and waste a lot of time frobbing around with the code. Refactoring is part of a suite of best practices that have to be implemented together (including source control, unit testing and project management). A clumsy and careless programmer can do a lot more damage with a powerful IDE, a skilled programmer can get more done.
It takes a lot more discipline, knowledge (of the know-how variety), and professionalism to be a good programmer these days. Back in the day there were very good programmers, and *terrible* programmers, and not much in between. These days there are more programming jobs than there are people gifted at programming, so what you see is a lot of mediocrity. Consequently all those powerful tools are neither a panacea nor a plague. Mediocre programmers will produce mediocre results no matter what they use.
I'll see your ad hominem and raise you a petitio principii.
Not every personal attack is an *ad hominem* attack. In order to raise a claim of ad hominem you have to establish that the person making the argument has used the character of his opponent to undermine the opponent's arguments in a way that is irrelevant.
So what I want to know is, what is the specific argument made by Assange that is the subject of the supposed ad hominem?
I can see several connections between Assange's personal character and the Wikileaks issue, just not the simple-minded one that goes like this: Assange is a bad person, therefore Wikileaks is bad.
The issue of character has in a sense already been raised by some of Assange's supporters, many of whom believe the Swedish rape charges are purely political dirty tricks by the security establishment he embarrassed. Assange's personal behavior is clearly relevant to *that* at least.
So let's say for a moment the rape charges are true -- does that have any relevance to the question of whether Wikileaks is a good idea? My first instinct is to answer "no," but it occurs to me that the question "Is Wikileaks a good idea?" is different from "Is Wikileaks run by Julian Assange a good idea?" Wikileaks has evolved from an open wiki to something which depends critically on Assange's discretion and judgment. Even some of the people who worked with Assange on Wikileaks evidently aren't so comfortable with him in the critical role he's carved out for himself.
I think that so far Wikipedia has been a good thing; so far as we know it hasn't cause the kind of horrific damage to national security or the personal lives of innocent bystanders that some have predicted. That counts for a lot. Assange's apparent personal unpleasantness doesn't concern me so much as the possibility his potential legal vulnerability due to things which *shouldn't* be related to Wikileaks. In an ironic way I find his evidently shameless egotism and personal abrasiveness a little reassuring. None of these "revelations" about Assange seem terribly surprising, and in a scandal it's attempting to preserve secrecy that does the most damage.
So count me as positive on Wikileaks, somewhat ambivalent on Assange. I'd like to see someone in charge whose personal life wasn't so tumultuous, although I recognize that may be asking for too much.
Slashdot Mirror
Second time was for being a smartass to the prison shrink.
Have you considered lodging a complaint against this guy? The use of psychological torture in a situation like this might well qualify him for professional sanctions.
[3] - Technically, life in prison works, in that they don't commit any more crimes
That is an assumption you are making, and it's a bad one. Not only do criminals continue to do the obvious in-prison crimes like assault on other prisoners and guards, they actually participate in out-of-prison crimes through the development of gang networks, which is greatly facilitated by prisons, particularly dangerous ones where an individual needs protection.
Should we massage them like Kobe cows?
If that's the only option short of solitary confinement as practiced in US prison, I suspect you haven't put much thought into the problem.
That's not engineering, it's wishful thinking. Which is not to say it is *wrong*, just unjustified.
The system is designed to be in static equilibrium, so it is by no means guaranteed that the kind of results you are envisioning are the only possible alternatives.
That makes me felafel.
The issue isn't where peoples' eyes are pointed. The issue is what people will actually see.
It's one thing to move the clock, gas tank gauge and speedometer up so it appears to float over the road. It's another to do the same thing with a book, a work document or a sports game.
Stuff that only requires brief attention and is relevant to the operation of the car is perfectly safe, which is why it's OK when it is set down in the dashboard, away from your view of the road. The audio system is less relevant to the operation of the car and can take more attention for longer as you look for what you want. People *do* get into accidents because they take too much time fiddling with their radio instead of looking at the road. But that's behavior you can guard against.
Something that takes the driver's focus off driving is bound to be bad, even if it is optimally placed in his field of vision.
Your example raises an interesting point in that the justification to refuse to serve the KKK is arguably *less* than refusing to serve a gay couple. A cake is not an instrument of violence and oppression, unless the Klan starts leaving sinister cakes instead of burning crosses on people's lawns. A gay wedding cake is actually about redefining what has been the recent cultural norm for marriages.
I actually think that if this law were only confined to fancy cakes and photographers, it wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunate, perhaps, but people can bake their own cakes and take their own pictures if need be. What I'm concerned about is the cumulative effect of *any* kind of business being denied to people on the basis of their private behavior and beliefs.
For example imagine a gay couple living in a small Arizona town. The local grocery store won't sell to them, so they have to drive fifty miles to shop at Walmart. Then their car breaks down and the local mechanic won't fix it. If you like for "gay" substitute "atheist", "Mormon", or "black" if you like. It's one thing not to associate with people you disapprove of, it's another to drive them out of town. To live in a place you need to be able to purchase goods and services.
The law can't make us like each other, nor should it try, but it should enable us at a minimum to live together in peace and order.
One of the things I don't see discussed much is the potential failure modes for such a system.
My wife is a physical oceanographer, and one of the failure modes for instruments deployed on cables from a ship is a 'wuzzle' -- a large tangle of steel cable. Given the nature of the stuff, a length of cable that fits nicely in a spool on deck can twist itself into a knot larger than the ship.
So one thing I'd like to know is what are the potential hazards a couple thousand miles of elevator cable falling to the Earth's surface? Could we end up with tangles miles in diameter?
I think a space elevator is a great idea if it's feasible, provided that in the criteria for "feasible" we include being prepared for the conceivable ways the project could fail.
Subjectively, the bike becomes comfortable when it feels like an extension of your body. It's natural to shift around and be loose rather than stiff. If you were running you'd naturally move around obstacles or change your gait.
From TFA:
Remind you of any super-costly projects in the US?
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is way over budget and behind schedule. This is no doubt partly due to the ambitious goals of the project, but the fact that it employees 35000 people carefully spread over the majority of congressional districts in the country might also contribute. It's hard enough to do the nearly impossible without having to budget proof the project by doing it in an extravagantly complicated way.
Depends on the number of hours you put in the saddle. If you just ride an hour or two on the weekend, then a cushy seat and upright posture feels comfortable. If you ride many more hours per week it's a prescription for saddle sores and cut off circulation near the tops of your femurs.
If you ride a lot, you get used to the drop handlebars, which afford a number of small but significant changes in posture over a long ride, and allow you to use more of your body muscles (along with cleated shoes). Also with drop handlebars you support more of your weight on your hands and legs, so no manhood problems. When I was riding over a hundred miles per week, I found the most comfortable saddle was hard plastic with no padding at all.
You can certainly add a conversion kit to a frame of your choice -- they're out there for well under $1000.
I think the reason for the upgright position is that it appeals to people without any experience bikes. I suspect that's the target market: people who find the idea of bikes appealing but are intimidated by being the motor.
I used to be a regular bike commuter riding about 120-150 miles/week, but when I got a job with a 100+ mile round trip commute I gave it up. When I turned 50 I hadn't been on a bike in fifteen years and confess I did some thinking about an electric bike as a way to get back into it. Instead I bought a folding bike with the idea I could mix public transit and cycling, only to discover, low and behold, that despite being older and fatter, my legs still work well enough. Soon I was going on twenty or thirty mile rides with no motor assist wanted, even on the hills. Young people may blast by me on the hills, but one of the bonuses of age is I don't give a damn as long as I'm having fun.
Well, it fits the picture of someone who's interested in crypto -- the kind of person who'd get involved with crypto-currency. There's nothing wrong with doing a proof of concept, but relying on roll-your-own crypto is a bad idea unless you have other people with serious experience reviewing your work.
People who grew up recently in American suburbs often have little experience of what a working city is like.
Traffic and parking aren't a problem in a densely populated city because most trips that would be taken by car in the suburbs are taken on foot, sometimes with the subway. The total amount of crime is much higher in cities, but much of that difference disappears when you look at crime per capita. A lot of that crime is concentrated in failing cities; a successful big city tends to have lower crime because there are people around and because of the high concentration of police. Concentration is *good* for safety. New York City has a property crime rate half of Riverside California or Phoenix, AZ, and 1/3 that of Oklahoma City or Wichita, KS. It has half as many rapes per capita as sprawling San Jose or 1/3 of Corpus Christi and 1/6 of Colorado Springs.
Visit Manhattan if you haven't and spent a couple of days. The fact that everything is so busy, practically around the clock, is what makes NYC one the safest major cities to live in. It's even reasonably safe to stroll through Central Park after dark on a fine summer evening, because so many other people are doing it.
It's *abandonment* that makes cities dangerous; so crime is not a reasonable justification for abandoning cities. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Assange is a dick. Therefore murdering journalists is ok.
There is no logical connection between the two.
I agree there's no connection but that's a strawman argument. So far as I know nobody is advocating that position.
One actual argument might be that Assange is a loose cannon, therefore he should not have access to peoples' secrets. That's not necessarily an irrational thing to believe, but we *do* have to weigh that against what the secrets actually *say* -- particularly state secrets. Any reasonable, impartial person would have to admit that it's better to have *some* state secrets in the hands of a loose cannon than to allow them to remain secret.
My point is that Assange's character is a very important issue given the sensitivity of the role he's appointed himself to. That doesn't mean we have to be simple-minded about that and draw irrelevant ad hominem conclusions about what the government is up to. Assange's character is certainly relevant to the question of whether he's a suitable broker of whistleblower secrets.
The best argument in Assange's favor is, in my opinion, that so far as we know nothing disastrous has happened as a result of his activities. Unless you count embarassment, which I do not.
Ha! Good catch.
Well, judging from TFA, they are cutting spending for FY 2015 to 496 bln, then raising it to 535, 545 and $559 bln in following years. That means if you deduct the wartime finding for Iran and Afghanistan, the baseline spending level will be back to pre-sequester levels, and as much as the next seven countries in defense spending rank put together.
Not that spending is at all a measure of how much defense we get. One of the things the budget does is it retires the A10 Warthog attack plane which costs less than $18K/flight hour to operate and replaces it with the F-35, which is currently *promised* to cost $32K/flight hour, if it ever becomes combat ready.
I recently did some literature research into ontology technology, and was shocked by how many papers were pot-boilers that disguised trivial ideas with inflated language. These were papers that had absolutely no discernible academic value other than to pad a resume, and collect but a smattering of citations, mostly from similar papers. In comparison the seminal papers, the ones that get tons of citations for years to come are robust, thought-provoking and well-written.
Granted the well-written part probably has something to do with attracting future citations, but I think the trivial nature of the useless papers probably has something to do with their obscure style.
Or are they just privatizing more military functions?
Well...
My wife went to public school in Massachusetts in the 1960s and 1970s and in her town they taught personal finance as part of the curriculum. I think a lot of that kind of forward thinking went out with ed reform, which focused on more traditional academic subjects. Massachusetts was early on the ed reform bandwagon, and consequently our students perennially top the nation in math, science and reading scores in the past decade. It sounds like the Mass DoE is looking for a way to shoehorn back in some of the content that got squeezed out.
I'd buy a car called "the Gay" just to pick fights with bigots.
Which facts are being attacked here?
If you're a bad carpenter, I suppose a powerful saw could make you a worse one. At least it allows you to make a bigger mess.
I've been a programmer for over thirty years now. When I started out, programming was about figuring out how to do things. Now it's much more about figuring out how to get someone else's code to do something. This shift was probably inevitable, as we try to get systems to do more and more. Very few of us have the luxury of being able to get away with just reading section 2 and 3 of the Unix manual; now we need to work with frameworks.
It's not like back in the day when you could code your own alternative to qsort as long as it worked; working with a framework's facilities is mandatory if you want the framework to do all the magical under-the-cover things it is supposed to do. We used to read the Unix manuals cover to cover from section 1 (commands) to section 7 (special files). Compilation and linking takes forever on a CPU running in the single digit MHz range, so we had plenty of time on our hands. That small but complete knowledge set, plus emacs, and we were cooking with gas.
These days you'd need to have loads more *static* knowledge to really know the APIs you're working with.So having things like pop-up parameter entry and a manual for the framework integrated into the IDE is nice.
But for me, the thing that finally got me away from emacsfor good was refactoring support in IDEs. And that's where the power saw analogy comes in. Refactoring is powerful, but it's also possible to drop down the refactoring rabbit hole and waste a lot of time frobbing around with the code. Refactoring is part of a suite of best practices that have to be implemented together (including source control, unit testing and project management). A clumsy and careless programmer can do a lot more damage with a powerful IDE, a skilled programmer can get more done.
It takes a lot more discipline, knowledge (of the know-how variety), and professionalism to be a good programmer these days. Back in the day there were very good programmers, and *terrible* programmers, and not much in between. These days there are more programming jobs than there are people gifted at programming, so what you see is a lot of mediocrity. Consequently all those powerful tools are neither a panacea nor a plague. Mediocre programmers will produce mediocre results no matter what they use.
I'll see your ad hominem and raise you a petitio principii.
Not every personal attack is an *ad hominem* attack. In order to raise a claim of ad hominem you have to establish that the person making the argument has used the character of his opponent to undermine the opponent's arguments in a way that is irrelevant.
So what I want to know is, what is the specific argument made by Assange that is the subject of the supposed ad hominem?
I can see several connections between Assange's personal character and the Wikileaks issue, just not the simple-minded one that goes like this: Assange is a bad person, therefore Wikileaks is bad.
The issue of character has in a sense already been raised by some of Assange's supporters, many of whom believe the Swedish rape charges are purely political dirty tricks by the security establishment he embarrassed. Assange's personal behavior is clearly relevant to *that* at least.
So let's say for a moment the rape charges are true -- does that have any relevance to the question of whether Wikileaks is a good idea? My first instinct is to answer "no," but it occurs to me that the question "Is Wikileaks a good idea?" is different from "Is Wikileaks run by Julian Assange a good idea?" Wikileaks has evolved from an open wiki to something which depends critically on Assange's discretion and judgment. Even some of the people who worked with Assange on Wikileaks evidently aren't so comfortable with him in the critical role he's carved out for himself.
I think that so far Wikipedia has been a good thing; so far as we know it hasn't cause the kind of horrific damage to national security or the personal lives of innocent bystanders that some have predicted. That counts for a lot. Assange's apparent personal unpleasantness doesn't concern me so much as the possibility his potential legal vulnerability due to things which *shouldn't* be related to Wikileaks. In an ironic way I find his evidently shameless egotism and personal abrasiveness a little reassuring. None of these "revelations" about Assange seem terribly surprising, and in a scandal it's attempting to preserve secrecy that does the most damage.
So count me as positive on Wikileaks, somewhat ambivalent on Assange. I'd like to see someone in charge whose personal life wasn't so tumultuous, although I recognize that may be asking for too much.