It's like my late father-in-law, who was an engineer, used to say: figures don't lie, by liars do figure.
In the case of the RIAA, the argument takes the form of X->Y, Y, therefore X. Logs that are *consistent* with piratical activity do not necessarily *prove* such activity took place. They may shift your level of Bayesian belief in that direction, but to somebody coming the problem with no preconceptions it's not enough to conclude that the piracy occurred.
In the case we're discussing here, citing extracts or products made from logs doesn't prove anything, because you can't be certain that the raw data hasn't been cherry-picked or otherwise mishandled. Even if you believe Musk is trying to be honest, he's not necessarily honest with himself; many a sincere researcher has fooled himself into seeing things that aren't there. That's why the gold standard in scientific proof is reproduction of results, or in cases where that is not feasible (e.g. field observations of events) access to the raw data. You have to be able to audit data all the way back to medium on which it was recorded.
For the record, I think *both* parties in this dispute are probably honest, but unreliable.
Those words you italicized? They don't mean what you think they do.
True, but eventually they *will*.
I cringe at the use of "begs the question" when the writer means "raises the question". The use of "impact" as a synonym for "affect" still makes my eye twitch. I don't like it, but rationally, I accept that trying to stop people from changing the meaning of words they don't understand is just spitting into the wind.
One way patenting genes differs from patenting some kind of mechanism, is that there's almost always another way to accomplish what that mechanism does. I've heard a number of engineers make statements to the effect that the most important thing about an invention is that what it does is possible. So while a monopoly on a mechanism design is valuable, it does not stop all competition in that field of endeavor.
A monopoly on a fact about nature isn't like that. If somebody claimed a patent on gravity, there are no alternatives. If someone patents a gene's involvement in a certain disease, there is no substitute for that fact to be discovered.
Monopolizing genetic treatment and diagnosis of breast cancer by patenting BRCA1 is like monopolizing all flying and lifting machines by patenting gravity.
Well, I guess because not everything called "epilepsy" acts identically. It's conceivable to me at least that while some people who are diagnosed with "epilepsy" cannot drive a car safely, others can.
I know someone who has an "epilepsy" diagnosis but no visible symptoms. She can be on the EEG machine and talking with her doctor while the machine is saying she is having a seizure. She wouldn't even know she had "epilepsy" if she hadn't volunteered to be a subject for a research project.
Check me if I wrong, but hasn't the iPhone always been behind on features?
Well, there's two aspects to this phenomenon. One is that more features doesn't necessarily translate into a better user experience. What *does* make for a better experience is often the stuff that's left out, and that depends on the user. So for me, my Android phone is about perfect, but an (ironically named) feature phone is the best experience for my mother-in-law, who just wants to be able to make and receive calls. There's no way to make her phone better for her by adding features, and plenty of ways to screw it up.
The second facet of this phenomenon is that Apple has mastered the consumer upgrade cycle, and part of that is spreading out meaningful but non-critical features to help push consumers over the upgrade bar. Thus the first generation iPod touches didn't have bluetooth or a built-in speaker, both of which users could live without happily, yet each of which was welcome when it came out in gen 2.
Is it a cheesy marketing gambit to withhold something simple from the product spec bingo card just so you can chivvy the customer along the upgrade treadmill? Sure, but consider the alternative: throwing all the features you can onto the device and then trying to get the users to upgrade by redefining the user interface experience every generation. *Not* having the users upgrade periodically is a non-starter for a manufacturer.
Your scenario may be true, but it doesn't describe what is going on here. Amazon is simply siding with the party that has the greatest power to drive their legal costs up.
The problem is not with the law becoming *complex*, so much as it is becoming *cheap*. Lawyers are cheap enough for companies to use them to harass people, but not cheap enough that an ordinary person can afford to defend himself.
I remember that time... The irony is that your post illustrates the most infuriating thing about the way Communists like to argue: "I can explain X in terms of Y, so therefore Y caused X!"
California (and New York) are hemorrhaging population and business.
I suppose you're right, if you count gaining a quarter million in population in 2012 as "hemorraghing population".
Every few weeks I see more and more business headlines of companies (namely tech) moving to or starting a branch in Texas such as Apple [wired.com], Facebook [statesman.com], PayPal [austinnovation.com], Catepillar [msn.com] and so on
Texas is a big state -- the second most populous in the US. It's not surprising that big companies are opening operations in Texas -- it's sampling. If we go by jobs created, almost exactly twice as many jobs were created in California in the most recent 12 month period we have data for -- 350K to 175K. If we normalize the number of jobs created by dividing by each state's population (38 million vs. 26 million), we get California outperforming Texas in new job generation (9.2 new jobs/1000 residents compared to Texas' 6.7 ).
Of course even that's misleading. Prior to the 2008 recession, California and Texas had roughly comparable unemployment rates, around 4.5% more or less. The recession drove unemployment in Texas up to 8%, but California's soared to over 12%. So the robust job creation in California no doubt represents a rebound of industries
I wonder how long Texas can remain "Texas" if it becomes stuffed with people who are accustomed to living like Californians and New Yorkers.
That's hardly your biggest demographic worry if Texas remaining "Texas" means what I think it means.
Yeah , and the only thing that sucks more is pathetic coalition politics that happens in a lot of europe which means nothing radical or important ever gets done because the governing parties can't agree.
It's not quite so simple as that. One mathematical definition of political power is the number of winning coalitions a player can join. Given a significant number of parties with none dominant, very small fringe parties can often find themselves in a "kingmaker" position, allowing them to promote more radical policies than the majority of the electorate would favor.
Take the current UK coalition government. The Conservatives have a plurality of seats (306) in the House of Commons, and have two choices for coalition partners, Labour (257) or the Liberal Democrats (57). Suppose the Conservatives had a dozen more seats. This could potentially put the fourth largest party, the nationalist/unionist Democratic Union Party from Northern Ireland (8 seats) in a position to form a winning coalition with the Conservatives, effectively giving this small party equal power to the much larger Labour and LibDem parties -- they can all join in exactly one winning coalition. The Conservatives on the other hand could form coalitions with any of the next three smaller parties (discounting absurd coalitions with anti-union parties like Sinn Féin and the Scottish Nationalist Party).
tl;dr: Novels have lots of filler (for arguably good reasons).
Maybe, but it's not filler I'm talking about. It's substance. If I could put an idea or event into a reader's head by telepathy, without need for words at all, I'd do it. The very best writing often feels like that.
until you've examined both things being compared and understand why they are what they are.
I've just completed my third novel, my first which I feel is good enough to shop to agents and editors. I've spent considerable time testing my manuscripts and scenes by sharing them with other writers and -- even more importantly -- critiquing their manuscripts. The vast majority of unpublished manuscripts are every bit as tedious you can imagine. Now picture yourself pouring over those in minute detail, thinking about them as hard as you possibly can. You'd begin to see that most faults in writing involve mishandling, misdirecting, or abusing readers' attention.
Suppose you were reading a hundred thousand word novel -- roughly three hundred pages in paperback, and *every single sentence* was written in a way to calculated to grab you by the collar and make you remember. It would be exhausting; I'd be surprised if you made it more than a couple of pages into the story.
The vast majority of sentences in a well-written novel are meant to transfer information into your consciousness without ever being noticed. They're utility sentences -- the semantic delivery vans of literature -- and when they do their work the action of the novel flows efficiently, without hindrance. Some of my fellow authors refer to this quality where reader attention moves unimpeded through a story as "lightness".
Fashions vary with generation, of course. Victorian writers wrote many more ornate, dense, complicated sentences than modern ones do. And for some writers conspicuous prose style is the main pleasure. But even a celebrated purple prose writer like EE Doc Smith wrote mostly utility sentences, reserving the "coruscant displays of pyrotechnic splendor" for high points in the story.
Now there are all kinds of unflattering but true things you can say about most of what gets published, but "hard to read" isn't one of them. It shouldn't be surprising that a random sampling of sentences turns up very few memorable ones, any more than a random sampling of vehicles on the highway turns up more delivery vans and Toyota Corollas than Ferraris.
Well, my experience with Chinese goods is that they give the customer what he wants. If he wants quality, he gets quality. If he wants a shiny facade over a piece of crap, that's what he gets.
What's important to note here is that the customer is seldom the end-user. It's usually a retailer, which accounts for the present day predominance of polished-turd products detouring in our homes on their way to the landfill. Once a product is sold and out of warranty, the retailer is happy if it needs replacement, and Chinese manufacturers have got planned obsolescence down to a science.
The interesting wrinkle here is that the customer in this case may have had a higher interest in software quality than the corporation he worked for. It was his reputation on the line in the way his employer's reputation was not.
That was my thought. You'd be doing him a favor. He's an intern and that means he's there to learn. That'd teach him an important lesson to take into his professional life.
I feel a development team has to constantly stretch. Somebody who comes in and challenges you to do better is in itself a good thing. But most coding these days is a collaborative effort and there's no place for prima donna behavior or theatrics. Those things are unprofessional, and wages of unprofessional behavior are dismissal.
This is what the whole agile movement was about -- working together to continually improve code without chest thumping, egotistical posturing and the disruption that comes with it. In the real world you seldom have time to make something as good as you wanted to make it -- at least all in one go. You get the job done for the customer, then as you maintain the code you constantly improve it by refactoring, using the whole spectrum of agile tools like source control and unit testing to provide a safety net.
The government's offered deal was basically...the legal equivalent of a gun to the head with a threat of prosecution if anyone didn't take it,
In this country you have to convict someone before a jury of their peers. Yes, the prospect of prosecution is a powerful threat to people without the means to defend themselves, but the senior executives of a major financial institution have the resources to hire very good lawyers.
So at best the "threat" was an empty one. At worst, the feds were giving these guys a break in return for facilitating a deal that would limit the damage to innocent bystanders. They might not have *liked* that, but its hardly the moral equivalent of a gun to the head.
A gun to their head? Their *creditors* were about to put the gun to AIG's head *and pull the trigger*. Complaining about being in a weak negotiation position when the government came along to bail them out smacks of hubris.
The better title might be 'Anonymous actually gives a damn about gang rape case, unlike clannish and football crazed natives of some backwater hellhole'.
I'm not so certain about that. On one hand, there is a certain pleasure in playing the part of a masked vigilante. On the other, people seem to be unaware that the Steubenville police actually arrested and charged two of the football players eleven days after the incident, well before Anonymous got involved. That may seem slow, but is eleven days a long time for the police department to take to charge someone with a crime like that? I don't know, the only criminal investigations I've ever seen are on TV.
Suppose the Steubenville police response was timely, and that it didn't have sufficient evidence (at the time) to pursue further indictments. In that case it would be possible to put an entirely different construction on the facts, e.g., that Anonymous is getting its rocks off at the expense of the victim. I actually think they believe they are doing good, but the jury is out on that as far as I'm concerned. People nearly *always* feel they are doing good.
When something like this happens, the public wants quick, easy-to-digest answers -- that means answers that tell us what we already believe. But there are some important questions here, and what I'm afraid is that the public won't have the attention span to get *good* answers.
The better title might be 'Anonymous actually gives a damn about gang rape case, unlike clannish and football crazed natives of some backwater hellhole'.
You don't know that. If it's like most communities most places, people are along a spectrum from knuckledraggers who think drunk girls are fair game to tub-thumpers who advocate castration for looking at a woman lustfully, and everything in between. What matters is which groups are the most organized and have their hands on the reins of political power.
It's easy to jump to conclusions that nobody cares just because you haven't heard that anyone cares, especially if it fits into a narrative you believe in, for example that all small town people are narrow-minded and ignorant. The truth is we can't know, because of the death of reporting in this country. Somebody has to go there with the intent to ferret out the facts and not to tell some pre-determined story.
The first thing that needs to be done is to try the accused perpetrators fairly. After that there probably needs to be something like a truth and reconciliation commission like they had in South Africa -- not focused on the rape itself but on the official and public response to the rape. Why were some suspects pursued and others not? Who knew about it and why didn't they call the police? Who do people think knew about it but actually didn't? Was the investigation handled properly? Until questions like that are answered, public opinion will consider everyone guilty by association. We can't rely on the media to do the job because they're just a sideshow bent on selling tickets.
It's not the severity of punishment that matters the most, it's the *certainty*.
Pickpockets used to work the crowds gathered to watch executions of thieves. Making punishment more severe doesn't work as deterrence if the perpetrators won't get punished, and making it *unreasonably* or shockingly harsh would actually make people reluctant to cooperate in catching and prosecuting wrongdoers.
What you need to do is raise the chance that a criminal will be caught and punished. When you see a cop car by the side of the road or hear your radar detector going off, that has a much more powerful effect on your behavior than a sign saying speeding fines are doubled, because it feels normal to speed and not get caught. If it felt *abnormal* to get away with speeding, you wouldn't.
Preventing and punishing crime are effective, but hard to do and therefore expensive. Declaring a harsh mandatory sentence for a crime is easy and cheap to do, but has almost no effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Slashdot used to be so much more hip when Jon Katz was around. Now get off my lawn.
It's like my late father-in-law, who was an engineer, used to say: figures don't lie, by liars do figure.
In the case of the RIAA, the argument takes the form of X->Y, Y, therefore X. Logs that are *consistent* with piratical activity do not necessarily *prove* such activity took place. They may shift your level of Bayesian belief in that direction, but to somebody coming the problem with no preconceptions it's not enough to conclude that the piracy occurred.
In the case we're discussing here, citing extracts or products made from logs doesn't prove anything, because you can't be certain that the raw data hasn't been cherry-picked or otherwise mishandled. Even if you believe Musk is trying to be honest, he's not necessarily honest with himself; many a sincere researcher has fooled himself into seeing things that aren't there. That's why the gold standard in scientific proof is reproduction of results, or in cases where that is not feasible (e.g. field observations of events) access to the raw data. You have to be able to audit data all the way back to medium on which it was recorded.
For the record, I think *both* parties in this dispute are probably honest, but unreliable.
Let me attempt to clear this up.
Those words you italicized? They don't mean what you think they do.
True, but eventually they *will*.
I cringe at the use of "begs the question" when the writer means "raises the question". The use of "impact" as a synonym for "affect" still makes my eye twitch. I don't like it, but rationally, I accept that trying to stop people from changing the meaning of words they don't understand is just spitting into the wind.
One way patenting genes differs from patenting some kind of mechanism, is that there's almost always another way to accomplish what that mechanism does. I've heard a number of engineers make statements to the effect that the most important thing about an invention is that what it does is possible. So while a monopoly on a mechanism design is valuable, it does not stop all competition in that field of endeavor.
A monopoly on a fact about nature isn't like that. If somebody claimed a patent on gravity, there are no alternatives. If someone patents a gene's involvement in a certain disease, there is no substitute for that fact to be discovered.
Monopolizing genetic treatment and diagnosis of breast cancer by patenting BRCA1 is like monopolizing all flying and lifting machines by patenting gravity.
Well, I guess because not everything called "epilepsy" acts identically. It's conceivable to me at least that while some people who are diagnosed with "epilepsy" cannot drive a car safely, others can.
I know someone who has an "epilepsy" diagnosis but no visible symptoms. She can be on the EEG machine and talking with her doctor while the machine is saying she is having a seizure. She wouldn't even know she had "epilepsy" if she hadn't volunteered to be a subject for a research project.
So people can make pope jokes. Duh.
Check me if I wrong, but hasn't the iPhone always been behind on features?
Well, there's two aspects to this phenomenon. One is that more features doesn't necessarily translate into a better user experience. What *does* make for a better experience is often the stuff that's left out, and that depends on the user. So for me, my Android phone is about perfect, but an (ironically named) feature phone is the best experience for my mother-in-law, who just wants to be able to make and receive calls. There's no way to make her phone better for her by adding features, and plenty of ways to screw it up.
The second facet of this phenomenon is that Apple has mastered the consumer upgrade cycle, and part of that is spreading out meaningful but non-critical features to help push consumers over the upgrade bar. Thus the first generation iPod touches didn't have bluetooth or a built-in speaker, both of which users could live without happily, yet each of which was welcome when it came out in gen 2.
Is it a cheesy marketing gambit to withhold something simple from the product spec bingo card just so you can chivvy the customer along the upgrade treadmill? Sure, but consider the alternative: throwing all the features you can onto the device and then trying to get the users to upgrade by redefining the user interface experience every generation. *Not* having the users upgrade periodically is a non-starter for a manufacturer.
It's a place right out of his-tor-ry.
Keep your posts about Bing-beating to yourself, you perv.
Your scenario may be true, but it doesn't describe what is going on here. Amazon is simply siding with the party that has the greatest power to drive their legal costs up.
The problem is not with the law becoming *complex*, so much as it is becoming *cheap*. Lawyers are cheap enough for companies to use them to harass people, but not cheap enough that an ordinary person can afford to defend himself.
I remember that time... The irony is that your post illustrates the most infuriating thing about the way Communists like to argue: "I can explain X in terms of Y, so therefore Y caused X!"
California (and New York) are hemorrhaging population and business.
I suppose you're right, if you count gaining a quarter million in population in 2012 as "hemorraghing population".
Every few weeks I see more and more business headlines of companies (namely tech) moving to or starting a branch in Texas such as Apple [wired.com], Facebook [statesman.com], PayPal [austinnovation.com], Catepillar [msn.com] and so on
Texas is a big state -- the second most populous in the US. It's not surprising that big companies are opening operations in Texas -- it's sampling. If we go by jobs created, almost exactly twice as many jobs were created in California in the most recent 12 month period we have data for -- 350K to 175K. If we normalize the number of jobs created by dividing by each state's population (38 million vs. 26 million), we get California outperforming Texas in new job generation (9.2 new jobs/1000 residents compared to Texas' 6.7 ).
Of course even that's misleading. Prior to the 2008 recession, California and Texas had roughly comparable unemployment rates, around 4.5% more or less. The recession drove unemployment in Texas up to 8%, but California's soared to over 12%. So the robust job creation in California no doubt represents a rebound of industries
I wonder how long Texas can remain "Texas" if it becomes stuffed with people who are accustomed to living like Californians and New Yorkers.
That's hardly your biggest demographic worry if Texas remaining "Texas" means what I think it means.
Yeah , and the only thing that sucks more is pathetic coalition politics that happens in a lot of europe which means nothing radical or important ever gets done because the governing parties can't agree.
It's not quite so simple as that. One mathematical definition of political power is the number of winning coalitions a player can join. Given a significant number of parties with none dominant, very small fringe parties can often find themselves in a "kingmaker" position, allowing them to promote more radical policies than the majority of the electorate would favor.
Take the current UK coalition government. The Conservatives have a plurality of seats (306) in the House of Commons, and have two choices for coalition partners, Labour (257) or the Liberal Democrats (57). Suppose the Conservatives had a dozen more seats. This could potentially put the fourth largest party, the nationalist/unionist Democratic Union Party from Northern Ireland (8 seats) in a position to form a winning coalition with the Conservatives, effectively giving this small party equal power to the much larger Labour and LibDem parties -- they can all join in exactly one winning coalition. The Conservatives on the other hand could form coalitions with any of the next three smaller parties (discounting absurd coalitions with anti-union parties like Sinn Féin and the Scottish Nationalist Party).
tl;dr: Novels have lots of filler (for arguably good reasons).
Maybe, but it's not filler I'm talking about. It's substance. If I could put an idea or event into a reader's head by telepathy, without need for words at all, I'd do it. The very best writing often feels like that.
until you've examined both things being compared and understand why they are what they are.
I've just completed my third novel, my first which I feel is good enough to shop to agents and editors. I've spent considerable time testing my manuscripts and scenes by sharing them with other writers and -- even more importantly -- critiquing their manuscripts. The vast majority of unpublished manuscripts are every bit as tedious you can imagine. Now picture yourself pouring over those in minute detail, thinking about them as hard as you possibly can. You'd begin to see that most faults in writing involve mishandling, misdirecting, or abusing readers' attention.
Suppose you were reading a hundred thousand word novel -- roughly three hundred pages in paperback, and *every single sentence* was written in a way to calculated to grab you by the collar and make you remember. It would be exhausting; I'd be surprised if you made it more than a couple of pages into the story.
The vast majority of sentences in a well-written novel are meant to transfer information into your consciousness without ever being noticed. They're utility sentences -- the semantic delivery vans of literature -- and when they do their work the action of the novel flows efficiently, without hindrance. Some of my fellow authors refer to this quality where reader attention moves unimpeded through a story as "lightness".
Fashions vary with generation, of course. Victorian writers wrote many more ornate, dense, complicated sentences than modern ones do. And for some writers conspicuous prose style is the main pleasure. But even a celebrated purple prose writer like EE Doc Smith wrote mostly utility sentences, reserving the "coruscant displays of pyrotechnic splendor" for high points in the story.
Now there are all kinds of unflattering but true things you can say about most of what gets published, but "hard to read" isn't one of them. It shouldn't be surprising that a random sampling of sentences turns up very few memorable ones, any more than a random sampling of vehicles on the highway turns up more delivery vans and Toyota Corollas than Ferraris.
I work in a porno shop and probably get laid way more than the entirety of the /. population combined.
I can well believe both your assertions, but fail to see how they are connected.
Well, my experience with Chinese goods is that they give the customer what he wants. If he wants quality, he gets quality. If he wants a shiny facade over a piece of crap, that's what he gets.
What's important to note here is that the customer is seldom the end-user. It's usually a retailer, which accounts for the present day predominance of polished-turd products detouring in our homes on their way to the landfill. Once a product is sold and out of warranty, the retailer is happy if it needs replacement, and Chinese manufacturers have got planned obsolescence down to a science.
The interesting wrinkle here is that the customer in this case may have had a higher interest in software quality than the corporation he worked for. It was his reputation on the line in the way his employer's reputation was not.
That was my thought. You'd be doing him a favor. He's an intern and that means he's there to learn. That'd teach him an important lesson to take into his professional life.
I feel a development team has to constantly stretch. Somebody who comes in and challenges you to do better is in itself a good thing. But most coding these days is a collaborative effort and there's no place for prima donna behavior or theatrics. Those things are unprofessional, and wages of unprofessional behavior are dismissal.
This is what the whole agile movement was about -- working together to continually improve code without chest thumping, egotistical posturing and the disruption that comes with it. In the real world you seldom have time to make something as good as you wanted to make it -- at least all in one go. You get the job done for the customer, then as you maintain the code you constantly improve it by refactoring, using the whole spectrum of agile tools like source control and unit testing to provide a safety net.
The government's offered deal was basically...the legal equivalent of a gun to the head with a threat of prosecution if anyone didn't take it,
In this country you have to convict someone before a jury of their peers. Yes, the prospect of prosecution is a powerful threat to people without the means to defend themselves, but the senior executives of a major financial institution have the resources to hire very good lawyers.
So at best the "threat" was an empty one. At worst, the feds were giving these guys a break in return for facilitating a deal that would limit the damage to innocent bystanders. They might not have *liked* that, but its hardly the moral equivalent of a gun to the head.
A gun to their head? Their *creditors* were about to put the gun to AIG's head *and pull the trigger*. Complaining about being in a weak negotiation position when the government came along to bail them out smacks of hubris.
The better title might be 'Anonymous actually gives a damn about gang rape case, unlike clannish and football crazed natives of some backwater hellhole'.
I'm not so certain about that. On one hand, there is a certain pleasure in playing the part of a masked vigilante. On the other, people seem to be unaware that the Steubenville police actually arrested and charged two of the football players eleven days after the incident, well before Anonymous got involved. That may seem slow, but is eleven days a long time for the police department to take to charge someone with a crime like that? I don't know, the only criminal investigations I've ever seen are on TV.
Suppose the Steubenville police response was timely, and that it didn't have sufficient evidence (at the time) to pursue further indictments. In that case it would be possible to put an entirely different construction on the facts, e.g., that Anonymous is getting its rocks off at the expense of the victim. I actually think they believe they are doing good, but the jury is out on that as far as I'm concerned. People nearly *always* feel they are doing good.
When something like this happens, the public wants quick, easy-to-digest answers -- that means answers that tell us what we already believe. But there are some important questions here, and what I'm afraid is that the public won't have the attention span to get *good* answers.
The better title might be 'Anonymous actually gives a damn about gang rape case, unlike clannish and football crazed natives of some backwater hellhole'.
You don't know that. If it's like most communities most places, people are along a spectrum from knuckledraggers who think drunk girls are fair game to tub-thumpers who advocate castration for looking at a woman lustfully, and everything in between. What matters is which groups are the most organized and have their hands on the reins of political power.
It's easy to jump to conclusions that nobody cares just because you haven't heard that anyone cares, especially if it fits into a narrative you believe in, for example that all small town people are narrow-minded and ignorant. The truth is we can't know, because of the death of reporting in this country. Somebody has to go there with the intent to ferret out the facts and not to tell some pre-determined story.
The first thing that needs to be done is to try the accused perpetrators fairly. After that there probably needs to be something like a truth and reconciliation commission like they had in South Africa -- not focused on the rape itself but on the official and public response to the rape. Why were some suspects pursued and others not? Who knew about it and why didn't they call the police? Who do people think knew about it but actually didn't? Was the investigation handled properly? Until questions like that are answered, public opinion will consider everyone guilty by association. We can't rely on the media to do the job because they're just a sideshow bent on selling tickets.
It's not the severity of punishment that matters the most, it's the *certainty*.
Pickpockets used to work the crowds gathered to watch executions of thieves. Making punishment more severe doesn't work as deterrence if the perpetrators won't get punished, and making it *unreasonably* or shockingly harsh would actually make people reluctant to cooperate in catching and prosecuting wrongdoers.
What you need to do is raise the chance that a criminal will be caught and punished. When you see a cop car by the side of the road or hear your radar detector going off, that has a much more powerful effect on your behavior than a sign saying speeding fines are doubled, because it feels normal to speed and not get caught. If it felt *abnormal* to get away with speeding, you wouldn't.
Preventing and punishing crime are effective, but hard to do and therefore expensive. Declaring a harsh mandatory sentence for a crime is easy and cheap to do, but has almost no effect.
Because he's implying he's already done the work and is asking us to accept his conclusion based on that.
Enlighten us non-Arab speakers then. What have you seen on the Arabic broadcasts that are not on the English broadcasts?