The answer to your question is that most people don't believe that prison rape is appropriate. Nor is it sanctioned under our law. It is a crime in every state, but where you have a concentration of criminals, you have a concentration of crime. Prison rape is not inevitable (except in movies). "Only" about 2% of prisoners in the US are raped.
That rate climbs over 10% when you are talking about juvenile prisoners -- boys -- who are incarcerated with adults. This is about the same rate of sexual assault perpetrated at juvenile detention facilities by staff (12%), but in adult prisons involves a much higher chance of HIV transmission. The rate in juvenile facilities also includes coercive but less violent abuse (e.g. threatening to extend the prisoner's sentence if he does not engage in sex acts). In any case Mr. Childs is unlikely to be raped in prison given his age and the type of facility he will likely be in.
I should point out that the prison rape figures are still alarming, especially serious given the extraordinarily high rates of incarceration we have in the US, especially of children. About 3/4 of a percent of the US population is in prison, by far the highest rate in the world.
I bring the juvenile issue up because surely this is a litmus test of barbarism. Proponents of more frequent and longer prison sentences often advocate trying juveniles in adult courts. However they do not (saving anonymous Internet fruitcakes) argue that sexual assault of child offenders is something that ought to be sanctioned. I have certainly met a few rare individuals who believe that rape is part of the "cure", but I don't think many law and order advocates endorse this view -- at least not in public. I'd say that their attitude to this problem is more one of indifference. All things being equal most would rather it didn't happen, but they consider it a tolerable problem if the apart from that public safety and justice for victims are promoted.
The argument advocates typically make is that the public good is served by removing criminals from society. In the case of transferring youth to adult prisons, it is also asserted that they will receive longer sentences, keeping them off the street longer, and that the harsher conditions in adult prisons will "scare them straight". There is intuitive appeal in these positions, but they are not confirmed by studies of states where juvenile "transfer" laws have been passed. Juvenile crime rates have not dropped relative to states not having such laws, so it is probable that not enough youths are removed from the streets to make a difference. While sentences in the adult system are indeed longer, time actually served is not, and when released youths who have been spent time in adult prisons actually re-offend at a higher rate. However, even where it can be shown that juvenile transfer laws don't keep young offenders off the street longer, expose them to prison rape, and discharge them with higher rates of recidivism and sometimes HIV, I would not expect such laws to be repealed. People want these laws to work.
This brings me back to the question of why the problem of prison rape is so much larger in the US than the rest of the civilized world. The appalling things that happen in US prisons (particularly to young people) aren't a sign of intentional barbarism in US laws. Nor are they a sign of the barbarism of Americans as a whole, although we certainly have our share of law abiding citizens who are depraved enough to enjoy the prospect of prisoners being raped (some states more than their share).
These abominations are the result of a culture that values problem solving, even in the case of problems that are unsolvable. When we are faced with a problem that must be managed rather than solved, we still look for a solution. If a rationally defensible solution evades us, we look for a dramatic action to take. In such cases a harsh action seems plausible to us, even if it costs a tremendous amount of money (as our huge prison systems do).
True, the nation might be responding to bitter human enemy's nighttime heavy bomber raids with a stiff upper lip, but I say! An extrasolar tourist on a sightseeing holiday? That is really terrifying.
I don't see why this point has to keep coming up, because it's quite simple.
BSD maximizes the individual freedom of each immediate recipient of source code under that license. GPL maximizes the minimum net freedom enjoyed by the community of binary recipients as a whole.
Another way of thinking about it is that BSD provides a broader range of possible total freedom among ALL binary recipients than GPL does. They may have more freedom (including making proprietary works) or less freedom (because most recipients may not have source code and the developer through which they receive the software isn't obligated to help them). It all depends on the actions of people in between the originator of the software and the user.
GPL on the other than provides a completely predictable level of freedom once chosen, but that freedom is slightly less than the maximum possible net freedom under BSD because it does not include the freedom to reduce the rights downstream recipients get.
The 547 is the Barry White of bench top instruments. Its muscular aluminum frame is massive, yet understated. Dual independent time bases tells the ladies you've got a light but agile touch on the trigger circuits.
Truly, this is a scope for a discerning bachelor geek. When you meet an interesting woman, casually mention you've got a type 547 back in your apartment and she's bound to fish for an invitation. Then if later she cannot, in an intimate moment, resist playing with the plug-in unit, propose marriage on the spot.
Thought experiment. Suppose (hypothetically) we compare the on-time flight arrivals of Southwest Airlines with Alaska Airlines, and discover that Southwest is on time a greater percentage of the time. Then we do a breakdown by city and are surprised to discover that on every single line, Alaska Airlines beats Southwest. Is it inconsistent to assert that Southwest beats Alaska on average, but if we look at the data in detail, Alaska always beats Southwest?
Not necessarily. The biggest determinant of on-time arrivals is weather at the destination city. It is possible that for any given destination Alaska is always better, but it flies to destinations with bad weather more frequently.
The point of this thought experiment is to point out that you can't prove anything with th e kinds of figures Professor Perry is using. This is not to say that he is wrong, or that the conclusions he wants you to draw are wrong. They just aren't proven by the data.
What you have to do is disaggregate the figures by city, just as in the the hypothetical airline case. Government workers are more likely to work in capital cities, so it is probable that that skews the results. Whether it skews it enough to invalidate your conclusions, it is impossible to say. You may be right, you may be wrong.
Absolutely, I'm for the indoor application of DDT, provided that the agencies applying it can prevent it from being diverted to other applications. That's unfortunately a show-stopper in many of places DDT would do the most good.
The point of the 6 month proviso is this: If the transmission season is long, then DDT is the only material that allows you to treat once per year without sending a crew back to re-treat. That's a significant cost advantage. Note how DDT's big drawback is what makes it good here: it sticks around for a long time.
The South African situation is an interesting one, and I don't know enough about the program to comment authoritatively. Certainly kind of application the article talks about is the right kind for DDT: bed nets, screens, interior walls, etc.
I don't think the transmission season is long enough in most of SA to absolutely require DDT, but it is certainly possible that DDT in a well run domestic application program might have some marginal advantages over more modern materials. However we can't conclude that from the article because it doesn't say what the SA government was doing before they used DDT. We might be looking at the results of introducing a domestic spraying operation, not DDT per se. There's every reason to think that a domestic application program would have a huge impact on infection rates. Imagine a house with ten or fifteen people living in it. One of them contracts malaria. Now imagine that house swarming with Anopheles, the mosquito genus that transmits malaria.
The big problem is when a miracle material meets theft and corruption. By US standards, there has been a lot of turmoil and crime in South Africa, but by African standards, SA is in pretty good shape. I think it might well be the least corrupt country in Africa. It's certainly paradise next to Zimbabwe or Angola.
Well, some species like rats are so dependent on humans that your hypothesis is almost certain to be right. But if species that are less dependent or even don't tolerate human presence well are also declining, then it seems almost certain its radioactivity. Not all mammals are so dependent on people, just (not surprisingly) the ones you're most likely to come in contact with.
Mammals are a lot more susceptible to radiation than, say, insects are. Don't know about reptiles, fish, birds etc.
That economies of scale is a red herring argument. Right now electric cars are expensive because the basic technology is expensive
This argument seems circular to me. We cannot drive down the cost of the technology using economies of scale because that technology is too expensive.
I think you are making your point too broadly. There is no reason to suspect that economics works differently in this case than any other. If competitors A and B are both profitably selling electric car technology (due to subsidies), they still have the same economic incentive to save production costs that they would if they were selling profitable with no subsidy. However, if neither A nor B can sell electric cars at a profit, neither of them can be expected to make any serious effort at reducing electric car production costs.
One could argue that the subsidy in this case is more to the manufacturers than the buyers. Are electric cars really that much better than the best ICE cars available today? I don't think so. The net benefit, then, is to manufacturers who are now able to sell a product that gives them real-world experience designing and supporting a technology that no doubt will be important in the future. It's the manufacturers who take value away from this three way deal. The reason we might want to do this is that some of the kinds of knowledge generated by real world product development and support cannot be obtained by any amount of government research, as useful as that research is.
It might be better to say that dramatic cost reductions are not guaranteed by economies of scale over the short to mid term, and it is even possible that we might run into a few dis-economies of scale in the short run. That's an important point. Hypothetically, suppose that there will be no viable EV market without government subsidies for the next ten years. Then if we are paying out subsidies this year, we'd better be committed to do it for nine more years, otherwise we might a well have thrown that money into the furnace. In that hypothetical case the money would be better spent (if at all) on federally funded research.
So there are a number of questions we should ask. (A) getting to viable electric vehicles earlier than would happen naturally a priority for the public? (B) Is the mix of private investment and public investment one that minimize the wait (keeping in mind the possibility of premature investments in non-viable technologies)? (C) Do we have the political will to sustain the expenditures long enough to have a practical impact?
I think our will to sustain public investments is the most doubtful point.
Well, for the destruction of malarial mosquitos, I would assume your support then.
You would assume wrong.
I'm going to make this as simple as possible: all those promising anti-Malaria programs from the 1950s that used DDT as a giant chemical hammer? Most of were having serious resistance problems by the 1960s. There are documented cases of Anopheles populations acquiring resistance in as little as six years.
I could go into great detail about biological mechanism by which this happens, but there's really one principle you need to know: the absolute worst thing you can do in pesticide application is to expose an insect population to a sub-lethal dose. DDT, because it persists in the environment for a very long time, continually provides exactly that kind of sub-lethal dosage to each generation of insect. Note that in some places, you can have 20-30 mosquito generations per season.
What makes this worse is that DDT resistance also confers resistance to pyrethroids, a more modern, environmentally benign class of pesticides.
My position on DDT is that it has a place in domestic applications (bednets, barrier treatments) in regions where the transmission season is longer than six months. It should never be used outdoors and if inventory control is not robust enough to prevent that alternatives such as pyrethrins ought to be used instead. I'm assuming you've never done this kind of work in Africa, but in my experience the inventory control issue is a nightmare.
That means that until we have a technological solution to the inventory control issue, most programs are going to have use something other than DDT for domestic applications. That's far from a fatal blow. DDT is not as dramatically more cost effective as you seem to think (I'm not sure where you get the 100:1 figure), and in many instances DDT is no cheaper.
but the knee jerk reaction to "Silent Spring" essentially took away the premiere weapon in the arsenal against malaria.
The reason that DDT was able to be banned in so many places in the early 70s was that it was rapidly losing its effectiveness. Recent surveys have shown that DDT resistance remains in the majority of populations sampled in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Back in '72, DDT wasn't just the premier tool, for practical purposes it was the only tool, so naturally people pinned their hopes on it. It's forty year later, and technology has moved on. We have a much more varied, effective, and targetable arsenal. DDT is like carpet bombing; methoprene and BTI are like smart munitions.
But if you want to talk about economic rationality, you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick here. The question isn't whether Tesla could have got the loan from the private sector. The question is whether the government could have made a better return on the capital tied up in that loan. That includes (in fact is primarily a question of) externalities arising from what Tesla planned to do with that loan.
Yes, the government could have loaned that money on the normal credit market at a higher risk-adjusted rate, but the reason the government can make such a loan where the private sector would not is that governments have to calculate returns differently than a private entity would. Governments have to include the benefits shared by the entire nation. Unless you discount such public benefits 100% (as a private lender would and should), getting our principle back with a modest return makes such a loan a safer investment than dumping money into projects with entirely external benefits. Many highway projects, for example, have dubious public value. From a financial standpoint we'd be far better off putting that capital expended on such projects into a loan of equally dubious (or less dubious) public value.
I realize that there is a serious philosophical position that says that it is morally wrong for government to take money from private individuals and invest it on their behalf. Even if you hold that belief, it does not follow that the investment is financially irrational -- only immoral.
Yes, I understand about the economics of marginal expenditures, but we're not talking about a problem that's almost but not quite worth solving. And as far as DDT against modern pesticides, the difference nothing like the difference between $1 and $100 per person.
DDT is not magic pixie dust. It's a potentially useful material that arise from its specific chemical and toxicological properties. The very same thing makes DDT excellent in some applications and lousy in others: it is very stable. That's useful in applications like treating houses where you want to leave a residual toxic barrier. You don't have to re-treat as often. It's bad in agricultural applications because DDT hangs around and leaches into the environment after it's done its job. That makes it useless in a modern IPM program. Using DDT as magic pixie dust leads to trophic transfer, bioaccumulation and DDT resistant pests.
I've met lots of old guys who remember DDT fondly. In the post WW2 days it seemed like a miracle chemical. They sprayed it all over the place, and to be fair they killed a lot of critters, although mostly not just what they were after. Then Silent Spring was published, their magic pixie dust was taken away, and suddenly they didn't know how to do their job any longer. Back in the day killing bugs was an easy job. It was driven by the calendar. When the calendar said to, you drove around in a truck saturating the environment with pesticide. I'll bet most of the DDT sprayed back then didn't even hit the target, because most of the old guard didn't know what the hell they were doing.
Those old guys talked a lot about "eradication", but it never, ever happened. They never even came close to eradicating anything, except maybe the bald eagle. They watched a new generation come in with global positioning systems, computerized sprayers, stereo microscopes and all kinds of scientific looking hoo-gaws. The new guys wielded a scalpel, not a club. They used surveillance and biology to target the problem early, while it was still small, and used narrow spectrum tools. Deep down the old guard know these new guys do a better job than they ever did. And so the myth of the Golden Age of DDT was born.
As I've made clear, I think DDT should be used in some cases, but I'd rather have it banned than let it get into the hands of people looking for a magic bullet that cures all their insect problems. You can't take a giant chemical hammer and try to kill all insect life in the target area. It won't solve your problem, and it creates other problems. Given the propensity of people to try that sort of thing, the world's a better place with only pesticides that take brains to use successfully.
As for the biodiversity and habitat diversity being helped by rapid global warming, you have to specify the time scale you are talking about. Is it a million years? Sure. A hundred thousand years? Probably. Ten thousand years? Probably not. A thousand years? Certainly not.
As for a historical precedent for biodiversity decreasing under a warming trend, we absolutely have one. Naturally other effects confound the gross results, but the picture is consistent if you look at individual ecosystems that have been disrupted.
I know more about malaria than you can possibly imagine having worked in the field for many years. I've worked on the DDT issue as well, trying to see whether we could track the usage precisely enough to make it feasible to reintroduce, so I'm not some anti-DDT zealout. I know how DDT would be used, I know how it would be misused and what the consequences would be.
Without going into the gory details, the bottom line is that DDT would be very helpful, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to "fix" the malaria problem.
We can eradicate malaria without DDT. That we haven't points to the real underlying problem, which is that there isn't the will to solve Africa's problems. If we had the will to eradicate malaria with DDT, we'd almost certainly be able to do it without DDT. It's cheaper with DDT, but it's still a bargain as far as public investments are concerned. The irony is that if we had the will to eradicate malaria with DDT, we'd probably have the will to manage the responsible use of DDT in the program. But that's all reasoning contrary to fact. We collectively don't care enough to get the job done.
It's not just simplistic to say that if those wicked environmentalists are responsible for Africa's problems, and that it all comes down to DDT. It's just wrong. There's a lot of overlap between development NGOs and environmental NGOs, because of the impact of environmental problems on development.
Your view of the ecological reaction to higher temperatures is simply incorrect, at least on any reasonable timescale (less than ten thousand years). Rapid global warming will increase biomass, but reduce biodiversity or ecological diversity.
Presuming that it is feasible to reduce the pace of climate change by making fossil fuels marginally more expensive, the question of whether the higher energy prices will hurt the perennially screwed of the Earth more than climate change is almost laughable. Change always comes down hardest on the poorest. If you are wealthy enough, you can usually turn even bad change to your advantage.
The poorer you are, the more tied you are to a specific place to earn your living. I can move my investments faster than climate can change . I might even profit from it. A subsistence farmer facing a shift to a drier climate is just screwed.
Trotting out the Starving Children in Africa TM so we can keep driving our SUVs to the corner store is just tacky.
The place where marginal increases in energy prices are going to have a big effect aren't the countries with grinding, endemic poverty. Really cheap petroleum over the last few decades hasn't magically made that poverty go away. Nor is it the countries like the US that are very, very wealthy that will feel the hurt. We'll simply shift the use of our money toward more efficient technology, and simply cut out some of our more decadent energy excesses. The places where a marginal increase in energy prices will really hurt are places where there is a lot of change going on, like China or India. India has this huge middle class, and an even huger under-class. Low energy prices won't wipe out the underclass, high energy prices won't wipe out the middle class, but there's a lot of people working at getting ahead there and to some degree succeeding. The numbers are so huge that marginal changes in economic mobility work out to be lots and lots of people.
Even so, nobody is saying that all energy should be expensive. They're saying that fossil fuels should be more expensive. That might prompt the development of technologies that benefit the poorest more than a marginal drop in fossil fuel prices would. In any case, by the time the very poorest people in the world start benefiting from the world's petroleum supply, that barrel will be dry.
As far as a warmer planet being "better for life period", that's too vague to be meaningful. Are you saying that a warmer planet would have greater biomass? Is that better for life? Or are you saying that a warmer planet has greater biodiversity? Or greater diversity of habitats? Are you saying all living things will be happier?
The end result is coal being burnt at a lower rate, starting at a date that is sooner than it would be feasible to phase out coal.
The alternative is to burn coal at faster rate, until it looks like we're running out of it, and hope that will be early enough to find a complete replacement for it.
Unfortunately, this entire line of argument has gone off the rails.
Saying that PETA is hypocritical for having a position on alternative energy but opposing a particular scheme is just plain silly. The primary good they are pursuing is animal welfare. Energy policy has *utility* toward that good. An energy policy that promotes animal welfare is from their perspective a good thing. They are perfectly entitled to dislike a policy that harms animals, whether that policy is "alternative" or "conventional".
If we applied the very low standards for hypocrisy floating around in the background of this argument consistently, everyone would be a hypocrite. If you said, "I'm against government interference in the way businesses conduct their affairs," I could say, "Aha, but you *also* think that party A in a dispute should be able to avail itself of state power to compel B to comply with a contract. Since that interferes with how B conducts its business, you are a hypocrite." Then we can have a long and pointless argument about the meaning of "interfere" and "compel", when we both know darn well your position is that businesses should have an environment where they are free to identify and pursue their rational self-interest. From this point of view the impingement of others' self interest on that freedom is what is wrong, whether it is private fraud or public regulation beyond what is necessary to secure that freedom.
The problem with the statement "individuals 'have no presumption of innocence' when accused by the red light cameras" isn't that it is wrong. It is that it is horribly confused. It's like saying, "George Washington accomplished nothing as chief administrator of NASA." For many purposes you can treat that statement as true, but if you treat it as entirely true, including the assumptions it invites you to make, you end up going very, very wrong.
The presumption of innocence specifies what evidence has to accomplish. Evidence is not so much trumped by he presumption of innocence as judged to be relevant or irrelevant. For example, the following tidbit is not relevant evidence for guilt under the presumption of innocence: "John Doe was often late for work." You can't say, "Well, there you go; he was probably late for work that day, which explains why he ran that red light," because under the presumption of innocence using motivation as evidence of guilt is circular reasoning. You *can* say, "John Doe always left for work early, so he had no reason to be in a rush that morning," because you're allowed to assume that he is innocent when interpreting evidence.
The entire point of the process is to reach the point where a reasonable person must abandon the presumption of innocence in the face of evidence. So if I were in charge of fixing the thinking of people who say silly things like "individuals 'have no presumption of innocence' when accused by the red light cameras," I'd correct it to "The red light cameras are sufficient to show guilt in the face of the presumption of innocence." At that point the focus of the debate shifts to whether we can believe the evidence of the cameras in this case.
That shift of focus looks an awful lot like the accused has lost his presumption of innocence, but that is not the case. Suppose the defense presents evidence that the radar and cameras were routinely misaligned on these systems, and that the wrong car is photographed in those cases. Without the presumption, then they'd have to further prove that the camera was misaligned in *this* case. With the presumption, that is sufficient to shift the burden of proof back to the prosecutor, who must either show that the system was working properly in this case, or that the misalignment problem was so rare a reasonable person would discount it.
Suppose the cost to the public in terms of pollution from a ICE car is $10,000 over its lifetime, and the electric car's cost is $4,999. If a $5,000 causes someone to switch from ICE to electric, the public gets $1 of profit. *Not* giving the rebate would cost the public $1.
But if we are talking cash rather than value, the $5,000 rebate simply goes away. You might as well take fifty hundred dollar bills and throw them in the furnace. But the same goes for that $5,000 spent on employees. By that argument the government can't afford anything: public health, agriculture, highways, police, courts... anything.
What California is in is a cash crisis. Is there any doubt there is stupendous value in the economy of California? One can argue whether government expenditures are in the right place, but there is little doubt that money spent on people who (for example) track and contain agricultural pests is money well spent. The problem with a cash crisis is that it's like a person being starved for oxygen. You run out of cash, and everything stops. You die. A person who is suffocating doesn't worry about whether his life is as meaningful as it might be, his immediate priority is oxygen. He'll sort that other stuff out later.
It makes no sense to ask, can California afford A when it can't pay for B, if A is a public value and B is something that is instrumental to various public values. The question is can the budget be held together without doing too much damage. That means letting some public employees go, even though that is not necessarily a good decision from a value standpoint. On the other hand, a financial crisis is motivation to question where the greatest return on investment is.
At present, the most efficient "battery" would be unburned fossil fuels. The biggest advantage is that we already have the infrastructure in place to store energy as unburned fossil fuel; we simply use less of it during the day.
That's not a viable technology in the long term, but the long term gives us plenty of time to come up with efficient storage technologies (in any case if we don't collect it, that sunlight is going to waste). We should also expect to get energy from a greater variety of sources in the future, nuclear may be part of that.
I always preferred Shell Sort to Bubble Sort. It's just as easy to code as Bubble Sort. Although it's not asymptotically better that Bubble sort, it makes fewer exchanges and so tends to run faster in the average case. In my experience, it can be dramatically faster.
Basically Shell Sort is Insertion Sort, but it starts by comparing keys that are far apart. The heuristic is that in an unsorted array, keys usually have pretty far to go before they are in their final position. The algorithm removes larger amounts of entropy in the early rounds, leading to fewer exchanges in the later iterations.
That's what I like about Shell Sort. It takes a very simple sort algorithm and improves it with a clever insight into the problem.
I'm not so ready to believe that testing catches all possible bugs, especially when you are talking about a device that interacts with its environment and inputs in real time, as in the Therac 25 incident.
Clearly that is much less likely to happen today, if modern software engineering employed. But the real world is full of the unexpected, and putting a CPU in a device makes its response to the unexpected potentially much more complex. How complex? As complex as a faulty algorithm could be. And you'll never catch that fault if the algorithm looks right to casual inspection and passes the tests you happen to have contrived.
I believe, of course, that medical device software can be made reliable enough for a reasonable person. But in a universe of software that is safe enough for a reasonable person to trust, there are bound to be quite a few horrible mistakes. The vast majority of proprietary software will be fine, but when there is a problem, there are two issues we have to consider. The first is that the software developer's management has a conflict of interest. If it doesn't kill that many people (or hasn't killed anyone yet), they might choose to hide a defect and fix it in the next release. The second is that the software developer's engineers may not be able to find the fault, because it reflects deficiencies in their thinking and technique. Fresh eyes, free of any preconception are needed.
classes in Web Design? That's why God made the O'Reilly menagerie.
Sure, the occasional "Web Design" class is OK, but "Web Design" classes aren't education; they're *training*. Education is things like art and design theory, cultural history, psychology, marketing and communications, software architecture and so forth. Stuff that is not tied to some product release.
If you're paying for *training* and expecting to get an *education*, of course you're dissatisfied.
Now they won't let you place out of "Web Design 1". What does that tell me? You are at an institution that sells education, but provides training. Why? Because an honest training outfit is up front about what they're providing, which is something that will help you in your job for the next two or three years. If you say you don't need "Web Design 1", how can they force you to take it? It's only if "Web Design 1" is part of a required curriculum that you can be forced to take it, and if you've committed to an entire curriculum, why should they let you get out of paying for the classes?
Think about it: if you're going to commit to something as big as swallowing an entire curriculum, that curriculum should be almost entirely of things that don't become obsolete with the next software release or the Next Big Thing. Web Design elective? Great. Lets you know that the stuff you are learning isn't all theory. Web Design as a core requirement? OK, you're getting a degree with an expiration date.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the "well-known online school" is the U of P*x. You should really do you your homework before committing to send bundles of dough to an outfit like that. Yes, they are accredited, but they're also a for-profit outfit. There's nothing wrong with profit, but its run with an eye to quarterly profits, and that means spending as little on you (e.g. advising and departmental meetings to substitute useful stuff for what you already know). U of P*x has got horrible labor relations, and before you stand up and cheer for management, you have to realize this means it is notorious for having a transient faculty. I real educational institution has a stable faculty that does scholarly research.
In any case, U of P*x is so aggressive in marketing, that when I see it on your resume I instantly recognize the name... but it's not the kind of name recognition I have when I see "MIT" or even "Michigan State". I see those names, and I think "educational institution". I see "U of P*x" and I think "spammer".
So go to the real university, even if it means attending classes in meatspace. Or at least choose an on-line presence of a school that has a real campus and real faculty.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer to your question is that most people don't believe that prison rape is appropriate. Nor is it sanctioned under our law. It is a crime in every state, but where you have a concentration of criminals, you have a concentration of crime. Prison rape is not inevitable (except in movies). "Only" about 2% of prisoners in the US are raped.
That rate climbs over 10% when you are talking about juvenile prisoners -- boys -- who are incarcerated with adults. This is about the same rate of sexual assault perpetrated at juvenile detention facilities by staff (12%), but in adult prisons involves a much higher chance of HIV transmission. The rate in juvenile facilities also includes coercive but less violent abuse (e.g. threatening to extend the prisoner's sentence if he does not engage in sex acts). In any case Mr. Childs is unlikely to be raped in prison given his age and the type of facility he will likely be in.
I should point out that the prison rape figures are still alarming, especially serious given the extraordinarily high rates of incarceration we have in the US, especially of children. About 3/4 of a percent of the US population is in prison, by far the highest rate in the world.
I bring the juvenile issue up because surely this is a litmus test of barbarism. Proponents of more frequent and longer prison sentences often advocate trying juveniles in adult courts. However they do not (saving anonymous Internet fruitcakes) argue that sexual assault of child offenders is something that ought to be sanctioned. I have certainly met a few rare individuals who believe that rape is part of the "cure", but I don't think many law and order advocates endorse this view -- at least not in public. I'd say that their attitude to this problem is more one of indifference. All things being equal most would rather it didn't happen, but they consider it a tolerable problem if the apart from that public safety and justice for victims are promoted.
The argument advocates typically make is that the public good is served by removing criminals from society. In the case of transferring youth to adult prisons, it is also asserted that they will receive longer sentences, keeping them off the street longer, and that the harsher conditions in adult prisons will "scare them straight". There is intuitive appeal in these positions, but they are not confirmed by studies of states where juvenile "transfer" laws have been passed. Juvenile crime rates have not dropped relative to states not having such laws, so it is probable that not enough youths are removed from the streets to make a difference. While sentences in the adult system are indeed longer, time actually served is not, and when released youths who have been spent time in adult prisons actually re-offend at a higher rate. However, even where it can be shown that juvenile transfer laws don't keep young offenders off the street longer, expose them to prison rape, and discharge them with higher rates of recidivism and sometimes HIV, I would not expect such laws to be repealed. People want these laws to work.
This brings me back to the question of why the problem of prison rape is so much larger in the US than the rest of the civilized world. The appalling things that happen in US prisons (particularly to young people) aren't a sign of intentional barbarism in US laws. Nor are they a sign of the barbarism of Americans as a whole, although we certainly have our share of law abiding citizens who are depraved enough to enjoy the prospect of prisoners being raped (some states more than their share).
These abominations are the result of a culture that values problem solving, even in the case of problems that are unsolvable. When we are faced with a problem that must be managed rather than solved, we still look for a solution. If a rationally defensible solution evades us, we look for a dramatic action to take. In such cases a harsh action seems plausible to us, even if it costs a tremendous amount of money (as our huge prison systems do).
T
No kidding. He could have just paid for it.
Did you read the article? He did pay for it, but with he stockholders' money. That probably made it better for him.
True, the nation might be responding to bitter human enemy's nighttime heavy bomber raids with a stiff upper lip, but I say! An extrasolar tourist on a sightseeing holiday? That is really terrifying.
I don't see why this point has to keep coming up, because it's quite simple.
BSD maximizes the individual freedom of each immediate recipient of source code under that license. GPL maximizes the minimum net freedom enjoyed by the community of binary recipients as a whole.
Another way of thinking about it is that BSD provides a broader range of possible total freedom among ALL binary recipients than GPL does. They may have more freedom (including making proprietary works) or less freedom (because most recipients may not have source code and the developer through which they receive the software isn't obligated to help them). It all depends on the actions of people in between the originator of the software and the user.
GPL on the other than provides a completely predictable level of freedom once chosen, but that freedom is slightly less than the maximum possible net freedom under BSD because it does not include the freedom to reduce the rights downstream recipients get.
Luck has nothing to do with it. They bought the dog to do their income taxes.
I understand they've got special breeds for that now, like the wire-haired deduction hound and the tax haven terrier.
The 547 is the Barry White of bench top instruments. Its muscular aluminum frame is massive, yet understated. Dual independent time bases tells the ladies you've got a light but agile touch on the trigger circuits.
Truly, this is a scope for a discerning bachelor geek. When you meet an interesting woman, casually mention you've got a type 547 back in your apartment and she's bound to fish for an invitation. Then if later she cannot, in an intimate moment, resist playing with the plug-in unit, propose marriage on the spot.
What's frightening is extrapolating this kind of ideologically factual ignorance to an event that most adults currently alive don't remember.
Thought experiment. Suppose (hypothetically) we compare the on-time flight arrivals of Southwest Airlines with Alaska Airlines, and discover that Southwest is on time a greater percentage of the time. Then we do a breakdown by city and are surprised to discover that on every single line, Alaska Airlines beats Southwest. Is it inconsistent to assert that Southwest beats Alaska on average, but if we look at the data in detail, Alaska always beats Southwest?
Not necessarily. The biggest determinant of on-time arrivals is weather at the destination city. It is possible that for any given destination Alaska is always better, but it flies to destinations with bad weather more frequently.
The point of this thought experiment is to point out that you can't prove anything with th e kinds of figures Professor Perry is using. This is not to say that he is wrong, or that the conclusions he wants you to draw are wrong. They just aren't proven by the data.
What you have to do is disaggregate the figures by city, just as in the the hypothetical airline case. Government workers are more likely to work in capital cities, so it is probable that that skews the results. Whether it skews it enough to invalidate your conclusions, it is impossible to say. You may be right, you may be wrong.
Absolutely, I'm for the indoor application of DDT, provided that the agencies applying it can prevent it from being diverted to other applications. That's unfortunately a show-stopper in many of places DDT would do the most good.
The point of the 6 month proviso is this: If the transmission season is long, then DDT is the only material that allows you to treat once per year without sending a crew back to re-treat. That's a significant cost advantage. Note how DDT's big drawback is what makes it good here: it sticks around for a long time.
The South African situation is an interesting one, and I don't know enough about the program to comment authoritatively. Certainly kind of application the article talks about is the right kind for DDT: bed nets, screens, interior walls, etc.
I don't think the transmission season is long enough in most of SA to absolutely require DDT, but it is certainly possible that DDT in a well run domestic application program might have some marginal advantages over more modern materials. However we can't conclude that from the article because it doesn't say what the SA government was doing before they used DDT. We might be looking at the results of introducing a domestic spraying operation, not DDT per se. There's every reason to think that a domestic application program would have a huge impact on infection rates. Imagine a house with ten or fifteen people living in it. One of them contracts malaria. Now imagine that house swarming with Anopheles, the mosquito genus that transmits malaria.
The big problem is when a miracle material meets theft and corruption. By US standards, there has been a lot of turmoil and crime in South Africa, but by African standards, SA is in pretty good shape. I think it might well be the least corrupt country in Africa. It's certainly paradise next to Zimbabwe or Angola.
Well, some species like rats are so dependent on humans that your hypothesis is almost certain to be right. But if species that are less dependent or even don't tolerate human presence well are also declining, then it seems almost certain its radioactivity. Not all mammals are so dependent on people, just (not surprisingly) the ones you're most likely to come in contact with.
Mammals are a lot more susceptible to radiation than, say, insects are. Don't know about reptiles, fish, birds etc.
That economies of scale is a red herring argument. Right now electric cars are expensive because the basic technology is expensive
This argument seems circular to me. We cannot drive down the cost of the technology using economies of scale because that technology is too expensive.
I think you are making your point too broadly. There is no reason to suspect that economics works differently in this case than any other. If competitors A and B are both profitably selling electric car technology (due to subsidies), they still have the same economic incentive to save production costs that they would if they were selling profitable with no subsidy. However, if neither A nor B can sell electric cars at a profit, neither of them can be expected to make any serious effort at reducing electric car production costs.
One could argue that the subsidy in this case is more to the manufacturers than the buyers. Are electric cars really that much better than the best ICE cars available today? I don't think so. The net benefit, then, is to manufacturers who are now able to sell a product that gives them real-world experience designing and supporting a technology that no doubt will be important in the future. It's the manufacturers who take value away from this three way deal. The reason we might want to do this is that some of the kinds of knowledge generated by real world product development and support cannot be obtained by any amount of government research, as useful as that research is.
It might be better to say that dramatic cost reductions are not guaranteed by economies of scale over the short to mid term, and it is even possible that we might run into a few dis-economies of scale in the short run. That's an important point. Hypothetically, suppose that there will be no viable EV market without government subsidies for the next ten years. Then if we are paying out subsidies this year, we'd better be committed to do it for nine more years, otherwise we might a well have thrown that money into the furnace. In that hypothetical case the money would be better spent (if at all) on federally funded research.
So there are a number of questions we should ask. (A) getting to viable electric vehicles earlier than would happen naturally a priority for the public? (B) Is the mix of private investment and public investment one that minimize the wait (keeping in mind the possibility of premature investments in non-viable technologies)? (C) Do we have the political will to sustain the expenditures long enough to have a practical impact?
I think our will to sustain public investments is the most doubtful point.
Well, for the destruction of malarial mosquitos, I would assume your support then.
You would assume wrong.
I'm going to make this as simple as possible: all those promising anti-Malaria programs from the 1950s that used DDT as a giant chemical hammer? Most of were having serious resistance problems by the 1960s. There are documented cases of Anopheles populations acquiring resistance in as little as six years.
I could go into great detail about biological mechanism by which this happens, but there's really one principle you need to know: the absolute worst thing you can do in pesticide application is to expose an insect population to a sub-lethal dose. DDT, because it persists in the environment for a very long time, continually provides exactly that kind of sub-lethal dosage to each generation of insect. Note that in some places, you can have 20-30 mosquito generations per season.
What makes this worse is that DDT resistance also confers resistance to pyrethroids, a more modern, environmentally benign class of pesticides.
My position on DDT is that it has a place in domestic applications (bednets, barrier treatments) in regions where the transmission season is longer than six months. It should never be used outdoors and if inventory control is not robust enough to prevent that alternatives such as pyrethrins ought to be used instead. I'm assuming you've never done this kind of work in Africa, but in my experience the inventory control issue is a nightmare.
That means that until we have a technological solution to the inventory control issue, most programs are going to have use something other than DDT for domestic applications. That's far from a fatal blow. DDT is not as dramatically more cost effective as you seem to think (I'm not sure where you get the 100:1 figure), and in many instances DDT is no cheaper.
but the knee jerk reaction to "Silent Spring" essentially took away the premiere weapon in the arsenal against malaria.
The reason that DDT was able to be banned in so many places in the early 70s was that it was rapidly losing its effectiveness. Recent surveys have shown that DDT resistance remains in the majority of populations sampled in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Back in '72, DDT wasn't just the premier tool, for practical purposes it was the only tool, so naturally people pinned their hopes on it. It's forty year later, and technology has moved on. We have a much more varied, effective, and targetable arsenal. DDT is like carpet bombing; methoprene and BTI are like smart munitions.
You're absolutely right, so far as you go.
But if you want to talk about economic rationality, you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick here. The question isn't whether Tesla could have got the loan from the private sector. The question is whether the government could have made a better return on the capital tied up in that loan. That includes (in fact is primarily a question of) externalities arising from what Tesla planned to do with that loan.
Yes, the government could have loaned that money on the normal credit market at a higher risk-adjusted rate, but the reason the government can make such a loan where the private sector would not is that governments have to calculate returns differently than a private entity would. Governments have to include the benefits shared by the entire nation. Unless you discount such public benefits 100% (as a private lender would and should), getting our principle back with a modest return makes such a loan a safer investment than dumping money into projects with entirely external benefits. Many highway projects, for example, have dubious public value. From a financial standpoint we'd be far better off putting that capital expended on such projects into a loan of equally dubious (or less dubious) public value.
I realize that there is a serious philosophical position that says that it is morally wrong for government to take money from private individuals and invest it on their behalf. Even if you hold that belief, it does not follow that the investment is financially irrational -- only immoral.
Yes, I understand about the economics of marginal expenditures, but we're not talking about a problem that's almost but not quite worth solving. And as far as DDT against modern pesticides, the difference nothing like the difference between $1 and $100 per person.
DDT is not magic pixie dust. It's a potentially useful material that arise from its specific chemical and toxicological properties. The very same thing makes DDT excellent in some applications and lousy in others: it is very stable. That's useful in applications like treating houses where you want to leave a residual toxic barrier. You don't have to re-treat as often. It's bad in agricultural applications because DDT hangs around and leaches into the environment after it's done its job. That makes it useless in a modern IPM program. Using DDT as magic pixie dust leads to trophic transfer, bioaccumulation and DDT resistant pests.
I've met lots of old guys who remember DDT fondly. In the post WW2 days it seemed like a miracle chemical. They sprayed it all over the place, and to be fair they killed a lot of critters, although mostly not just what they were after. Then Silent Spring was published, their magic pixie dust was taken away, and suddenly they didn't know how to do their job any longer. Back in the day killing bugs was an easy job. It was driven by the calendar. When the calendar said to, you drove around in a truck saturating the environment with pesticide. I'll bet most of the DDT sprayed back then didn't even hit the target, because most of the old guard didn't know what the hell they were doing.
Those old guys talked a lot about "eradication", but it never, ever happened. They never even came close to eradicating anything, except maybe the bald eagle. They watched a new generation come in with global positioning systems, computerized sprayers, stereo microscopes and all kinds of scientific looking hoo-gaws. The new guys wielded a scalpel, not a club. They used surveillance and biology to target the problem early, while it was still small, and used narrow spectrum tools. Deep down the old guard know these new guys do a better job than they ever did. And so the myth of the Golden Age of DDT was born.
As I've made clear, I think DDT should be used in some cases, but I'd rather have it banned than let it get into the hands of people looking for a magic bullet that cures all their insect problems. You can't take a giant chemical hammer and try to kill all insect life in the target area. It won't solve your problem, and it creates other problems. Given the propensity of people to try that sort of thing, the world's a better place with only pesticides that take brains to use successfully.
As for the biodiversity and habitat diversity being helped by rapid global warming, you have to specify the time scale you are talking about. Is it a million years? Sure. A hundred thousand years? Probably. Ten thousand years? Probably not. A thousand years? Certainly not.
As for a historical precedent for biodiversity decreasing under a warming trend, we absolutely have one. Naturally other effects confound the gross results, but the picture is consistent if you look at individual ecosystems that have been disrupted.
I know more about malaria than you can possibly imagine having worked in the field for many years. I've worked on the DDT issue as well, trying to see whether we could track the usage precisely enough to make it feasible to reintroduce, so I'm not some anti-DDT zealout. I know how DDT would be used, I know how it would be misused and what the consequences would be.
Without going into the gory details, the bottom line is that DDT would be very helpful, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to "fix" the malaria problem.
We can eradicate malaria without DDT. That we haven't points to the real underlying problem, which is that there isn't the will to solve Africa's problems. If we had the will to eradicate malaria with DDT, we'd almost certainly be able to do it without DDT. It's cheaper with DDT, but it's still a bargain as far as public investments are concerned. The irony is that if we had the will to eradicate malaria with DDT, we'd probably have the will to manage the responsible use of DDT in the program. But that's all reasoning contrary to fact. We collectively don't care enough to get the job done.
It's not just simplistic to say that if those wicked environmentalists are responsible for Africa's problems, and that it all comes down to DDT. It's just wrong. There's a lot of overlap between development NGOs and environmental NGOs, because of the impact of environmental problems on development.
Your view of the ecological reaction to higher temperatures is simply incorrect, at least on any reasonable timescale (less than ten thousand years). Rapid global warming will increase biomass, but reduce biodiversity or ecological diversity.
Presuming that it is feasible to reduce the pace of climate change by making fossil fuels marginally more expensive, the question of whether the higher energy prices will hurt the perennially screwed of the Earth more than climate change is almost laughable. Change always comes down hardest on the poorest. If you are wealthy enough, you can usually turn even bad change to your advantage.
The poorer you are, the more tied you are to a specific place to earn your living. I can move my investments faster than climate can change . I might even profit from it. A subsistence farmer facing a shift to a drier climate is just screwed.
Trotting out the Starving Children in Africa TM so we can keep driving our SUVs to the corner store is just tacky.
The place where marginal increases in energy prices are going to have a big effect aren't the countries with grinding, endemic poverty. Really cheap petroleum over the last few decades hasn't magically made that poverty go away. Nor is it the countries like the US that are very, very wealthy that will feel the hurt. We'll simply shift the use of our money toward more efficient technology, and simply cut out some of our more decadent energy excesses. The places where a marginal increase in energy prices will really hurt are places where there is a lot of change going on, like China or India. India has this huge middle class, and an even huger under-class. Low energy prices won't wipe out the underclass, high energy prices won't wipe out the middle class, but there's a lot of people working at getting ahead there and to some degree succeeding. The numbers are so huge that marginal changes in economic mobility work out to be lots and lots of people.
Even so, nobody is saying that all energy should be expensive. They're saying that fossil fuels should be more expensive. That might prompt the development of technologies that benefit the poorest more than a marginal drop in fossil fuel prices would. In any case, by the time the very poorest people in the world start benefiting from the world's petroleum supply, that barrel will be dry.
As far as a warmer planet being "better for life period", that's too vague to be meaningful. Are you saying that a warmer planet would have greater biomass? Is that better for life? Or are you saying that a warmer planet has greater biodiversity? Or greater diversity of habitats? Are you saying all living things will be happier?
The end result is coal being burnt.
The end result is coal being burnt at a lower rate, starting at a date that is sooner than it would be feasible to phase out coal.
The alternative is to burn coal at faster rate, until it looks like we're running out of it, and hope that will be early enough to find a complete replacement for it.
My solution to this dilemma: intelligent people should hire beautiful models to state their opinions, just like companies do at trade shows.
Come to think of it, that's what Fox News would be doing if management had more intellectual integrity.
Unfortunately, this entire line of argument has gone off the rails.
Saying that PETA is hypocritical for having a position on alternative energy but opposing a particular scheme is just plain silly. The primary good they are pursuing is animal welfare. Energy policy has *utility* toward that good. An energy policy that promotes animal welfare is from their perspective a good thing. They are perfectly entitled to dislike a policy that harms animals, whether that policy is "alternative" or "conventional".
If we applied the very low standards for hypocrisy floating around in the background of this argument consistently, everyone would be a hypocrite. If you said, "I'm against government interference in the way businesses conduct their affairs," I could say, "Aha, but you *also* think that party A in a dispute should be able to avail itself of state power to compel B to comply with a contract. Since that interferes with how B conducts its business, you are a hypocrite." Then we can have a long and pointless argument about the meaning of "interfere" and "compel", when we both know darn well your position is that businesses should have an environment where they are free to identify and pursue their rational self-interest. From this point of view the impingement of others' self interest on that freedom is what is wrong, whether it is private fraud or public regulation beyond what is necessary to secure that freedom.
The problem with the statement "individuals 'have no presumption of innocence' when accused by the red light cameras" isn't that it is wrong. It is that it is horribly confused. It's like saying, "George Washington accomplished nothing as chief administrator of NASA." For many purposes you can treat that statement as true, but if you treat it as entirely true, including the assumptions it invites you to make, you end up going very, very wrong.
The presumption of innocence specifies what evidence has to accomplish. Evidence is not so much trumped by he presumption of innocence as judged to be relevant or irrelevant. For example, the following tidbit is not relevant evidence for guilt under the presumption of innocence: "John Doe was often late for work." You can't say, "Well, there you go; he was probably late for work that day, which explains why he ran that red light," because under the presumption of innocence using motivation as evidence of guilt is circular reasoning. You *can* say, "John Doe always left for work early, so he had no reason to be in a rush that morning," because you're allowed to assume that he is innocent when interpreting evidence.
The entire point of the process is to reach the point where a reasonable person must abandon the presumption of innocence in the face of evidence. So if I were in charge of fixing the thinking of people who say silly things like "individuals 'have no presumption of innocence' when accused by the red light cameras," I'd correct it to "The red light cameras are sufficient to show guilt in the face of the presumption of innocence." At that point the focus of the debate shifts to whether we can believe the evidence of the cameras in this case.
That shift of focus looks an awful lot like the accused has lost his presumption of innocence, but that is not the case. Suppose the defense presents evidence that the radar and cameras were routinely misaligned on these systems, and that the wrong car is photographed in those cases. Without the presumption, then they'd have to further prove that the camera was misaligned in *this* case. With the presumption, that is sufficient to shift the burden of proof back to the prosecutor, who must either show that the system was working properly in this case, or that the misalignment problem was so rare a reasonable person would discount it.
Well, what do you mean by "afford"?
Suppose the cost to the public in terms of pollution from a ICE car is $10,000 over its lifetime, and the electric car's cost is $4,999. If a $5,000 causes someone to switch from ICE to electric, the public gets $1 of profit. *Not* giving the rebate would cost the public $1.
But if we are talking cash rather than value, the $5,000 rebate simply goes away. You might as well take fifty hundred dollar bills and throw them in the furnace. But the same goes for that $5,000 spent on employees. By that argument the government can't afford anything: public health, agriculture, highways, police, courts ... anything.
What California is in is a cash crisis. Is there any doubt there is stupendous value in the economy of California? One can argue whether government expenditures are in the right place, but there is little doubt that money spent on people who (for example) track and contain agricultural pests is money well spent. The problem with a cash crisis is that it's like a person being starved for oxygen. You run out of cash, and everything stops. You die. A person who is suffocating doesn't worry about whether his life is as meaningful as it might be, his immediate priority is oxygen. He'll sort that other stuff out later.
It makes no sense to ask, can California afford A when it can't pay for B, if A is a public value and B is something that is instrumental to various public values. The question is can the budget be held together without doing too much damage. That means letting some public employees go, even though that is not necessarily a good decision from a value standpoint. On the other hand, a financial crisis is motivation to question where the greatest return on investment is.
At present, the most efficient "battery" would be unburned fossil fuels. The biggest advantage is that we already have the infrastructure in place to store energy as unburned fossil fuel; we simply use less of it during the day.
That's not a viable technology in the long term, but the long term gives us plenty of time to come up with efficient storage technologies (in any case if we don't collect it, that sunlight is going to waste). We should also expect to get energy from a greater variety of sources in the future, nuclear may be part of that.
I always preferred Shell Sort to Bubble Sort. It's just as easy to code as Bubble Sort. Although it's not asymptotically better that Bubble sort, it makes fewer exchanges and so tends to run faster in the average case. In my experience, it can be dramatically faster.
Basically Shell Sort is Insertion Sort, but it starts by comparing keys that are far apart. The heuristic is that in an unsorted array, keys usually have pretty far to go before they are in their final position. The algorithm removes larger amounts of entropy in the early rounds, leading to fewer exchanges in the later iterations.
That's what I like about Shell Sort. It takes a very simple sort algorithm and improves it with a clever insight into the problem.
I'm not so ready to believe that testing catches all possible bugs, especially when you are talking about a device that interacts with its environment and inputs in real time, as in the Therac 25 incident.
Clearly that is much less likely to happen today, if modern software engineering employed. But the real world is full of the unexpected, and putting a CPU in a device makes its response to the unexpected potentially much more complex. How complex? As complex as a faulty algorithm could be. And you'll never catch that fault if the algorithm looks right to casual inspection and passes the tests you happen to have contrived.
I believe, of course, that medical device software can be made reliable enough for a reasonable person. But in a universe of software that is safe enough for a reasonable person to trust, there are bound to be quite a few horrible mistakes. The vast majority of proprietary software will be fine, but when there is a problem, there are two issues we have to consider. The first is that the software developer's management has a conflict of interest. If it doesn't kill that many people (or hasn't killed anyone yet), they might choose to hide a defect and fix it in the next release. The second is that the software developer's engineers may not be able to find the fault, because it reflects deficiencies in their thinking and technique. Fresh eyes, free of any preconception are needed.
classes in Web Design? That's why God made the O'Reilly menagerie.
Sure, the occasional "Web Design" class is OK, but "Web Design" classes aren't education; they're *training*. Education is things like art and design theory, cultural history, psychology, marketing and communications, software architecture and so forth. Stuff that is not tied to some product release.
If you're paying for *training* and expecting to get an *education*, of course you're dissatisfied.
Now they won't let you place out of "Web Design 1". What does that tell me? You are at an institution that sells education, but provides training. Why? Because an honest training outfit is up front about what they're providing, which is something that will help you in your job for the next two or three years. If you say you don't need "Web Design 1", how can they force you to take it? It's only if "Web Design 1" is part of a required curriculum that you can be forced to take it, and if you've committed to an entire curriculum, why should they let you get out of paying for the classes?
Think about it: if you're going to commit to something as big as swallowing an entire curriculum, that curriculum should be almost entirely of things that don't become obsolete with the next software release or the Next Big Thing. Web Design elective? Great. Lets you know that the stuff you are learning isn't all theory. Web Design as a core requirement? OK, you're getting a degree with an expiration date.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the "well-known online school" is the U of P*x. You should really do you your homework before committing to send bundles of dough to an outfit like that. Yes, they are accredited, but they're also a for-profit outfit. There's nothing wrong with profit, but its run with an eye to quarterly profits, and that means spending as little on you (e.g. advising and departmental meetings to substitute useful stuff for what you already know). U of P*x has got horrible labor relations, and before you stand up and cheer for management, you have to realize this means it is notorious for having a transient faculty. I real educational institution has a stable faculty that does scholarly research.
In any case, U of P*x is so aggressive in marketing, that when I see it on your resume I instantly recognize the name... but it's not the kind of name recognition I have when I see "MIT" or even "Michigan State". I see those names, and I think "educational institution". I see "U of P*x" and I think "spammer".
So go to the real university, even if it means attending classes in meatspace. Or at least choose an on-line presence of a school that has a real campus and real faculty.