The most complex piece of software on your computer is a word processor. That's the problem. Things which are conceptually simple have become so monstrously bloated that they're now "complex software".
A word processor - particularly a WYSIWYG word processor - is a complex piece of software, and always has been.
Even something ancient like WordPerfect 5.1, is far from "conceptually simple".
It's already illegal to beat someone up. But then we had to go and make special laws that make it "extra bad" if the victim was part of some special minority group (race, sexual orientation, religion, etc...)? If the assault was already a crime, then what we are criminalizing is the person's thoughts.
No, we're taking into account the perpetrator's intent. This is a perfectly valid thing to do, and is why there is a difference between, say, manslaughter and premeditated murder.
No fucking wonder the law books are so bloated. In the quest for lawmakers to feel self important, they will keep adding laws to the books to continually restate other laws.
Most of the reason this is happening is because a non-trivial proportion of people are either a) too stupid to correlate the existing law to their behaviour (driving distracted ? No, I'm just talking on the phone - I wasn't distracted at all), or b) too selfish to take their punishment when they're caught by using the lack of specificity in the law (driving distracted ? No, I was just talking on the phone - I wasn't distracted at all - there's no law against driving and being on the phone).
Nobody is reckless or takes a risk for the purpose of taking a risk.
Lots of people do exactly that all the time. Some of them are called 'Thrillseekers'.
Therefore it is not correct to say it is their intention to behave recklessly. It's also not criminal. It becomes criminal when you do something for the purpose of harming someone.
So shooting off a gun randomly is ok so long as you don't have an intent to harm someone ?
If someone has been drinking and drives home their intention is to drive home. Depending on how acute their reactions were in the first place and how much they drank (and their body mass) they may do a better job of driving than someone who is annoyed about events at the office or frustrated with traffic.
They may indeed, but they are _vastly_ more likely to act recklessly and with poor judgement if they've been drinking. That's what alcohol *does*.
Who said anything about killed?
Feel free to substitute maimed or harmed if you prefer. It's not really that important.
You do know there is nothing automatic about drinking that makes you kill someone? You can be equally impaired by pissed about work or frustrated by traffic or being old or just being a lousy driver.
Not with the same probability you can't.
I also said nothing about 'locking up' preventing anything. I said punish those who cause harm.
How very Biblical. How does punishment 'prevent harm' then ?
The people who take the greatest risks (as defined by their own individual abilities) and who take risks often are the ones who will are most likely to cause harm. They are also aren't limited to causing harm once in their life. If you punish them in a way that dissuades them from causing future harm or outright makes it impossible the number of harmful people is reduced. That reduces the likelihood of harm happening again in the future.
You're still not preventing the first episode. Your approach is wholly reactionary.
If you are attempting to find a method that prevents all harm in the first place you are living in a happy fairytale land. Everyone takes risks and everyone does things that others might deem reckless. Even for those who are careful, shit happens. Driving around big hunks of metal at fast speeds is risky in itself and as long as it is allowed we as a society are accepting driving related fatalities (regardless of the cause) as a worthwhile trade.
Deliberately and voluntarily behaving in a way that dramatically increases risk to people around you is not acceptable. That's why we have laws against things like drink driving, using mobile phones while driving, shooting guns off randomly, and any of a myriad other things that may not actually cause harm, but are recklessly dangerous.
You must not actually be in the USA if you think it has been socially acceptable to drink and drive here anytime in the past decade.
Living here right now.
Admittedly I'm from Australia, where drink-driving *really is* socially unacceptable, but *none* of the people I know here in the US even blink at drinking at least twice as much as anyone would back home before driving.
Trying to kill someone would be an actual crime in and of itself.
Not in your world:
I think we should go back to punishing people when they actually do something that harms someone and punishing them severely rather than punishing them for something that might increase their chances of harming someone.
*Trying* to kill someone and failing could quite easily not cause any actual harm.
The law doesn't work on action alone, intent is as important if not more important.
Er, yeah, that's kind of why drink-driving is a crime.
The intent in question is reckless behaviour. Just like that example of firing off a gun irresponsibly.
I doubt this scenario is even possible.
Instead of focussing on the semantics of where it's happening, focus on the principle: recklessly endangering everyone around you.
If you want to prevent harm, you punish these people severely when they cause any and thereby make them more cautious in the future.
Uh huh. Perhaps you can explain how locking someone up *after* they've killed by drink-driving is "preventing harm", because I'm not quite seeing it.
I think we should go back to punishing people when they actually do something that harms someone and punishing them severely rather than punishing them for something that might increase their chances of harming someone.
So trying to kill someone and failing means no charge ? Kinda sucks if they succeed and you're the victim.
How about firing a gun at random in a crowded street ? All cool so long as no-one is hit ?
Intelligence is overrated when it comes to the president. They did IQ tests on the accused at Nuremberg trials and all of them scored far above average.
Folks, if any of you have ever wondered what a non-sequitur is, read the above sentences a few times.
Not saying that Palin qualifies by any means, just that the fact that Obama has high academic qualifications doesn't make him a good candidate, as his presidency so far has demonstrated.
Given he inherited a forty car pile-up, and most of the people he has to work with are busily trying to drive more cars into it, I'd have to say he's doing as good a job as is possible.
Could be worse, of course. If McCain had gotten in there probably would have been a couple of 747s crashed into that pile-up by now, maybe even a cargo boat.
You can tell just about every operating system in use today where to put a swap file.
Not the same thing. At all.
Your "new feature" is as relevent as "it also comes in pink". It was also a horrible kludge to get around memory usage issues and disk space limitations since most USB flash disks at the time (and many now) are horribly slow.
No, it was adding a caching layer to improve performance. Exactly the same principle used by NetApp, EMC, Sun, et al. *Exactly* how flash/SSD disk _should_ be being used, not with horrendous manual hacks requiring the user to understand and manually relocate data depending on what they think its performance requirements might be.
Most drivers in Paris knows how to park well without bumping, those who do that are mostly tourists (were you one of them ?) and old men who should'nt drive (i live there)
Most of the parking I've seen in Paris backstreets is literally bumped to bumper - you couldn't fit a finger between the cars. There's no physical way to get a vehicle out without pushing the other vehicles away.
No kidding. One of the "top percentile" sent my wife to the ER for a tummy ache telling us it was probably appendicitis. She also advocated CT scans for a tooth ache and tried to diagnose my wife with a thyroid problem when we had tests done by an endocrinologist who concluded she didn't have one.
That's because if your wife *had* been suffering from a serious problem, and those tests not been run to disprove that, when your wife died you'd sue the Doctor for $zillions.
The sad truth is that medical diagnosis today is driven as much by legal CYA as it is medicine. (One of the main reasons I didn't go into that field.)
Are you sure? But you say crime is caused by:No, I don't. I said *some* crime is caused by that.
Am I to understand that you believe if society were improved, such that there was (1) no desperation and (2) violence was not condoned, then crime would be isolated and rare?
Some types of crime certainly would be.
If so, then I think my statement, "You seem to be saying that crime happens because society is broken", is actually quite an accurate summary. "Widespread compliance" will be achieved naturally, you say, if only society is sufficiently stable and prosperous.
No, because you are trying to paint the situation as a simple black and white with a "crime" or "no crime" result.
No matter, though. What you say has exposed the deeper point of disagreement. I believe that society cannot be stable or prosperous unless it is willing to enforce laws.
I'm not quite sure where the disagreement is.
Even against large numbers of people, if necessary.
Generally speaking, if you have to "enforce" laws against "large numbers of people", they're bad laws and shouldn't exist in the first place.
We can surely come up with examples of crimes that would occur in a stable, prosperous society even if there were no threat of punishment. Tax evasion, for example. I bet you would agree that tax evasion is a serious crime, especially when large sums of money are involved.. and yet it is also a crime that would be very common if no action were taken against tax evaders. What's the incentive to do your taxes properly, if you know that 90% of the population are cheating and getting away with it?
You are arguing against a straw man. No-one said that laws shouldn't be enforced.
Social pressure alone is not enough to discourage crime; punishment is required as well.
Social pressure is quite enough to discourage most crime, and is by far the preferable option. This why most civilised societies do not robotically impose authoritarian and draconian punishments on their citizens to keep them in line.
If the threat of prison will discourage city bankers from cheating on their taxes, then the threat of prison will also discourage house burglars and muggers.
Why ? These are two very different classes of crime, with very different perpetrators, motivations and outcomes.
Indeed, this is the sort of thing you will find in right-wing tabloids, but that doesn't make it axiomatically wrong. And yes, it is simple, but simplicity is good - remember the KISS principle. To me, the 20th century crime figures coupled with the notable absence of crime in places where criminals are not tolerated (e.g. Singapore) are hard evidence: robust law enforcement is all that is necessary for a stable and prosperous society. It takes a specially trained person - a criminologist, for example - to deny that the simplest solution is also the correct one.
To any complex problem, there is always at least one solution that is obvious, simple, and wrong.
If you're from Europe, where everything is left or far left, America does indeed look like it is right or far right.
No, it's pretty much everywhere else except America. You would be hard-pressed to find any other remotely civilised country where the American "Left" wouldn't be seen as "Right".
You just don't realize that you've replaced one set of ruling elites, with another.
Heh, just like America, you mean ?
Some of us don't want that kind of leadership, and you can frown all you want at us, we don't care (except Obama and his apology tours).
Indeed. Heaven forbid the almighty USA show a bit of humility. That might imply it's not actually the pinnacle of human civilisation !
Well, this is a point which we are certain to disagree on, because you have the causal relationship the wrong way around. You seem to be saying that crime happens because society is broken.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all.
Generally speaking, laws that need to be enforced by fear of punishment are bad laws. Laws against assaulting or otherwise harming others can be considered prima facie as good laws, and as such shouldn't need the threat of harsh punishment for widespread compliance. So if such laws are being broken, then there is some sort of societal breakdown wherein either violence is becoming an accepted and condoned solution to inappropriate problems, and/or people are becoming desperate enough to use violence where they otherwise wouldn't.
In a stable and prosperous society, it is not the fear of gaol that prevents people from killing and maiming each other.
For example, I am sure that you would agree that 19th century British society was about as broken as any society could be, what with all the poverty, inequality and social injustice. And yet there was virtually no crime in relation to the present day, as you can see from the statistics (page 14 [parliament.uk]). So how could this be explained, if not by robust law enforcement?
Different standards in reporting and describing crime ? Lower urbanisation ? Hugely different lifestyles ? Fewer wars ? Immigration ? Those are just a few things that spring instantly to mind, but I'm sure there are multitudes of other factors.
You are trying to break a massively complex issue into a simplistic, stereotypical right-wing soundbite ("Get tougher on crime"). That alone is enough to make your conclusion highly suspect, even if a trivial and obvious counter-example - crime rates in the middle ages, when courts were laughably biased against the defendants and punishments brutal - were not.
One difference between their society and ours was their use of austere prisons - prisons run by the jailers rather than the inmates, with tough discipline. These were prisons that people didn't want to return to. Those are the sort of prisons you want.
If people would genuinely prefer to be in prison than out in society - a premise I strongly doubt outside of a few corner cases - then the proper solution is to fix the broken society, not make prison worse.
"Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism."
This statement hinges entirely on what "conventional religious beliefs" are.
If they in any way consider Humanity "special" (like, say, the Catholic Church does), then they are incompatible with "the science of Darwinism".
If your wanted for rape and they know your location the same thing would happen to you or me.
I can guarantee that if it happened to "you or me", neither of us would have made it to Interpol's most wanted list, nor had to produce a quarter-million-quid's worth of bail in the face of a complete lack of evidence, or even formal charges. Unless there's something about you you're not telling ?
That's is the kind of thing that happens to violent serial offenders with a long history of crimes and victims, not people accused for the first time of - and not even by the victim, but the state - relatively low-grade sexual assault.
he can't stop talking to the media so it was simple to actually find him. If they know of your location it is easier to find you.
He didn't need to be "found" because he wasn't trying to be "lost". He co-operated fully with the Swedish authorities before - with their permission - leaving Sweden and then fully with the UK authorities when there was actually cause to do so.
My personal favorite part was when the guardian published (leaked) the police reports from the ladies on Julian, and Julian and his lawyers cried foul as leaking private information about a private case like that is wrong.
And it is.
Testimony in a ongoing legal proceeding against a private individual is a completely different ballgame to historical record of Government dealings. If you cannot figure that out, you shouldn't be commenting.
But yea, given that a new ST 251-1 (40 meg hard drive) was $300~$400 at the time, being able to store 2.4 megabytes of data on a single $1 floppy disk seemed worth the risk.
You couldn't do this with 1.2MB disks as they were already double-sided (ie: the drives had two R/W heads), so your memory might be a bit hazy there.
IIRC, the biggest disks that could be used as "flippies" were 720K - 360K on each side (though might have only been 360K - 2x180K ?). Single-sided drives on IBM-compatible PCs were uncommon, however, as even the IBM XT had a double-sided drive.
This is a fact. This is reality. This is why communism never works and socialism always slowly fails. There must be a way to purge the system from those who will suck all they can from society but never add one bit of their own work.
No, you just need to be able to quantify them and then modify the equations appropriately so they are nullified (from an economics perspective).
Few "normal" people are going to be satisfied with a "basic income" when only marginally more effort (say, flipping burgers, or driving a cab) delivers a meaningfully better lifestyle.
None of this could have happened without deregulation of the telephone system. We wouldn't be having this conversation right now if we still have a government monopoly in telephone systems.
Complete and utter rubbish. Do not conflate what happened in the US with what "must" happen.
Slashdot Mirror
The most complex piece of software on your computer is a word processor. That's the problem. Things which are conceptually simple have become so monstrously bloated that they're now "complex software".
A word processor - particularly a WYSIWYG word processor - is a complex piece of software, and always has been.
Even something ancient like WordPerfect 5.1, is far from "conceptually simple".
It's absolutely real. Check out the Amazon page for some thoroughly entertaining reviews.
Why would you do this when you can book right on Expedia or Orbitz for the same price as booking direct on the airline's site?
It removes a non-trivial layer of obfuscation should anything go wrong.
With that sort of raping ^h^h^h^h^h personal service I am always amazed that airlines are still in business.
It's pretty much a given that these sorts of discrepancies are due to taxes and fees on the local arm of the business.
It's already illegal to beat someone up. But then we had to go and make special laws that make it "extra bad" if the victim was part of some special minority group (race, sexual orientation, religion, etc...)? If the assault was already a crime, then what we are criminalizing is the person's thoughts.
No, we're taking into account the perpetrator's intent. This is a perfectly valid thing to do, and is why there is a difference between, say, manslaughter and premeditated murder.
No fucking wonder the law books are so bloated. In the quest for lawmakers to feel self important, they will keep adding laws to the books to continually restate other laws.
Most of the reason this is happening is because a non-trivial proportion of people are either a) too stupid to correlate the existing law to their behaviour (driving distracted ? No, I'm just talking on the phone - I wasn't distracted at all), or b) too selfish to take their punishment when they're caught by using the lack of specificity in the law (driving distracted ? No, I was just talking on the phone - I wasn't distracted at all - there's no law against driving and being on the phone).
"If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." --Eric Schmidt
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." -- Pretty much every authoritarian in history.
Nobody is reckless or takes a risk for the purpose of taking a risk.
Lots of people do exactly that all the time. Some of them are called 'Thrillseekers'.
Therefore it is not correct to say it is their intention to behave recklessly. It's also not criminal. It becomes criminal when you do something for the purpose of harming someone.
So shooting off a gun randomly is ok so long as you don't have an intent to harm someone ?
If someone has been drinking and drives home their intention is to drive home. Depending on how acute their reactions were in the first place and how much they drank (and their body mass) they may do a better job of driving than someone who is annoyed about events at the office or frustrated with traffic.
They may indeed, but they are _vastly_ more likely to act recklessly and with poor judgement if they've been drinking. That's what alcohol *does*.
Who said anything about killed?
Feel free to substitute maimed or harmed if you prefer. It's not really that important.
You do know there is nothing automatic about drinking that makes you kill someone? You can be equally impaired by pissed about work or frustrated by traffic or being old or just being a lousy driver.
Not with the same probability you can't.
I also said nothing about 'locking up' preventing anything. I said punish those who cause harm.
How very Biblical. How does punishment 'prevent harm' then ?
The people who take the greatest risks (as defined by their own individual abilities) and who take risks often are the ones who will are most likely to cause harm. They are also aren't limited to causing harm once in their life. If you punish them in a way that dissuades them from causing future harm or outright makes it impossible the number of harmful people is reduced. That reduces the likelihood of harm happening again in the future.
You're still not preventing the first episode. Your approach is wholly reactionary.
If you are attempting to find a method that prevents all harm in the first place you are living in a happy fairytale land. Everyone takes risks and everyone does things that others might deem reckless. Even for those who are careful, shit happens. Driving around big hunks of metal at fast speeds is risky in itself and as long as it is allowed we as a society are accepting driving related fatalities (regardless of the cause) as a worthwhile trade.
Deliberately and voluntarily behaving in a way that dramatically increases risk to people around you is not acceptable. That's why we have laws against things like drink driving, using mobile phones while driving, shooting guns off randomly, and any of a myriad other things that may not actually cause harm, but are recklessly dangerous.
Porn and simple nudity are two very different things and my mind boggles as to why so many people don't seem to get that.
Because for lots and lots of people, they *are* the same thing.
I don't need a license to visit a public museum or ride public transportation.
That's because doing these things doesn't endanger everyone around you.
You must not actually be in the USA if you think it has been socially acceptable to drink and drive here anytime in the past decade.
Living here right now.
Admittedly I'm from Australia, where drink-driving *really is* socially unacceptable, but *none* of the people I know here in the US even blink at drinking at least twice as much as anyone would back home before driving.
Trying to kill someone would be an actual crime in and of itself.
Not in your world:
I think we should go back to punishing people when they actually do something that harms someone and punishing them severely rather than punishing them for something that might increase their chances of harming someone.
*Trying* to kill someone and failing could quite easily not cause any actual harm.
The law doesn't work on action alone, intent is as important if not more important.
Er, yeah, that's kind of why drink-driving is a crime.
The intent in question is reckless behaviour. Just like that example of firing off a gun irresponsibly.
I doubt this scenario is even possible.
Instead of focussing on the semantics of where it's happening, focus on the principle: recklessly endangering everyone around you.
If you want to prevent harm, you punish these people severely when they cause any and thereby make them more cautious in the future.
Uh huh. Perhaps you can explain how locking someone up *after* they've killed by drink-driving is "preventing harm", because I'm not quite seeing it.
Drunk driving is already socially unacceptable.
In the USA ? Surely you jest.
I think we should go back to punishing people when they actually do something that harms someone and punishing them severely rather than punishing them for something that might increase their chances of harming someone.
So trying to kill someone and failing means no charge ? Kinda sucks if they succeed and you're the victim.
How about firing a gun at random in a crowded street ? All cool so long as no-one is hit ?
Intelligence is overrated when it comes to the president. They did IQ tests on the accused at Nuremberg trials and all of them scored far above average.
Folks, if any of you have ever wondered what a non-sequitur is, read the above sentences a few times.
Not saying that Palin qualifies by any means, just that the fact that Obama has high academic qualifications doesn't make him a good candidate, as his presidency so far has demonstrated.
Given he inherited a forty car pile-up, and most of the people he has to work with are busily trying to drive more cars into it, I'd have to say he's doing as good a job as is possible.
Could be worse, of course. If McCain had gotten in there probably would have been a couple of 747s crashed into that pile-up by now, maybe even a cargo boat.
You can tell just about every operating system in use today where to put a swap file.
Not the same thing. At all.
Your "new feature" is as relevent as "it also comes in pink". It was also a horrible kludge to get around memory usage issues and disk space limitations since most USB flash disks at the time (and many now) are horribly slow.
No, it was adding a caching layer to improve performance. Exactly the same principle used by NetApp, EMC, Sun, et al. *Exactly* how flash/SSD disk _should_ be being used, not with horrendous manual hacks requiring the user to understand and manually relocate data depending on what they think its performance requirements might be.
Most drivers in Paris knows how to park well without bumping, those who do that are mostly tourists (were you one of them ?) and old men who should'nt drive (i live there)
Most of the parking I've seen in Paris backstreets is literally bumped to bumper - you couldn't fit a finger between the cars. There's no physical way to get a vehicle out without pushing the other vehicles away.
No kidding. One of the "top percentile" sent my wife to the ER for a tummy ache telling us it was probably appendicitis. She also advocated CT scans for a tooth ache and tried to diagnose my wife with a thyroid problem when we had tests done by an endocrinologist who concluded she didn't have one.
That's because if your wife *had* been suffering from a serious problem, and those tests not been run to disprove that, when your wife died you'd sue the Doctor for $zillions.
The sad truth is that medical diagnosis today is driven as much by legal CYA as it is medicine. (One of the main reasons I didn't go into that field.)
Are you sure? But you say crime is caused by:No, I don't. I said *some* crime is caused by that.
Am I to understand that you believe if society were improved, such that there was (1) no desperation and (2) violence was not condoned, then crime would be isolated and rare?
Some types of crime certainly would be.
If so, then I think my statement, "You seem to be saying that crime happens because society is broken", is actually quite an accurate summary. "Widespread compliance" will be achieved naturally, you say, if only society is sufficiently stable and prosperous.
No, because you are trying to paint the situation as a simple black and white with a "crime" or "no crime" result.
No matter, though. What you say has exposed the deeper point of disagreement. I believe that society cannot be stable or prosperous unless it is willing to enforce laws.
I'm not quite sure where the disagreement is.
Even against large numbers of people, if necessary.
Generally speaking, if you have to "enforce" laws against "large numbers of people", they're bad laws and shouldn't exist in the first place.
We can surely come up with examples of crimes that would occur in a stable, prosperous society even if there were no threat of punishment. Tax evasion, for example. I bet you would agree that tax evasion is a serious crime, especially when large sums of money are involved.. and yet it is also a crime that would be very common if no action were taken against tax evaders. What's the incentive to do your taxes properly, if you know that 90% of the population are cheating and getting away with it?
You are arguing against a straw man. No-one said that laws shouldn't be enforced.
Social pressure alone is not enough to discourage crime; punishment is required as well.
Social pressure is quite enough to discourage most crime, and is by far the preferable option. This why most civilised societies do not robotically impose authoritarian and draconian punishments on their citizens to keep them in line.
If the threat of prison will discourage city bankers from cheating on their taxes, then the threat of prison will also discourage house burglars and muggers.
Why ? These are two very different classes of crime, with very different perpetrators, motivations and outcomes.
Indeed, this is the sort of thing you will find in right-wing tabloids, but that doesn't make it axiomatically wrong. And yes, it is simple, but simplicity is good - remember the KISS principle. To me, the 20th century crime figures coupled with the notable absence of crime in places where criminals are not tolerated (e.g. Singapore) are hard evidence: robust law enforcement is all that is necessary for a stable and prosperous society. It takes a specially trained person - a criminologist, for example - to deny that the simplest solution is also the correct one.
To any complex problem, there is always at least one solution that is obvious, simple, and wrong.
If you're from Europe, where everything is left or far left, America does indeed look like it is right or far right.
No, it's pretty much everywhere else except America. You would be hard-pressed to find any other remotely civilised country where the American "Left" wouldn't be seen as "Right".
You just don't realize that you've replaced one set of ruling elites, with another.
Heh, just like America, you mean ?
Some of us don't want that kind of leadership, and you can frown all you want at us, we don't care (except Obama and his apology tours).
Indeed. Heaven forbid the almighty USA show a bit of humility. That might imply it's not actually the pinnacle of human civilisation !
Well, this is a point which we are certain to disagree on, because you have the causal relationship the wrong way around. You seem to be saying that crime happens because society is broken.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all.
Generally speaking, laws that need to be enforced by fear of punishment are bad laws. Laws against assaulting or otherwise harming others can be considered prima facie as good laws, and as such shouldn't need the threat of harsh punishment for widespread compliance. So if such laws are being broken, then there is some sort of societal breakdown wherein either violence is becoming an accepted and condoned solution to inappropriate problems, and/or people are becoming desperate enough to use violence where they otherwise wouldn't.
In a stable and prosperous society, it is not the fear of gaol that prevents people from killing and maiming each other.
For example, I am sure that you would agree that 19th century British society was about as broken as any society could be, what with all the poverty, inequality and social injustice. And yet there was virtually no crime in relation to the present day, as you can see from the statistics (page 14 [parliament.uk]). So how could this be explained, if not by robust law enforcement?
Different standards in reporting and describing crime ? Lower urbanisation ? Hugely different lifestyles ? Fewer wars ? Immigration ? Those are just a few things that spring instantly to mind, but I'm sure there are multitudes of other factors.
You are trying to break a massively complex issue into a simplistic, stereotypical right-wing soundbite ("Get tougher on crime"). That alone is enough to make your conclusion highly suspect, even if a trivial and obvious counter-example - crime rates in the middle ages, when courts were laughably biased against the defendants and punishments brutal - were not.
One difference between their society and ours was their use of austere prisons - prisons run by the jailers rather than the inmates, with tough discipline. These were prisons that people didn't want to return to. Those are the sort of prisons you want.
If people would genuinely prefer to be in prison than out in society - a premise I strongly doubt outside of a few corner cases - then the proper solution is to fix the broken society, not make prison worse.
"Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism."
This statement hinges entirely on what "conventional religious beliefs" are.
If they in any way consider Humanity "special" (like, say, the Catholic Church does), then they are incompatible with "the science of Darwinism".
If your wanted for rape and they know your location the same thing would happen to you or me.
I can guarantee that if it happened to "you or me", neither of us would have made it to Interpol's most wanted list, nor had to produce a quarter-million-quid's worth of bail in the face of a complete lack of evidence, or even formal charges. Unless there's something about you you're not telling ?
That's is the kind of thing that happens to violent serial offenders with a long history of crimes and victims, not people accused for the first time of - and not even by the victim, but the state - relatively low-grade sexual assault.
he can't stop talking to the media so it was simple to actually find him. If they know of your location it is easier to find you.
He didn't need to be "found" because he wasn't trying to be "lost". He co-operated fully with the Swedish authorities before - with their permission - leaving Sweden and then fully with the UK authorities when there was actually cause to do so.
My personal favorite part was when the guardian published (leaked) the police reports from the ladies on Julian, and Julian and his lawyers cried foul as leaking private information about a private case like that is wrong.
And it is.
Testimony in a ongoing legal proceeding against a private individual is a completely different ballgame to historical record of Government dealings. If you cannot figure that out, you shouldn't be commenting.
But yea, given that a new ST 251-1 (40 meg hard drive) was $300~$400 at the time, being able to store 2.4 megabytes of data on a single $1 floppy disk seemed worth the risk.
You couldn't do this with 1.2MB disks as they were already double-sided (ie: the drives had two R/W heads), so your memory might be a bit hazy there.
IIRC, the biggest disks that could be used as "flippies" were 720K - 360K on each side (though might have only been 360K - 2x180K ?). Single-sided drives on IBM-compatible PCs were uncommon, however, as even the IBM XT had a double-sided drive.
This is a fact. This is reality. This is why communism never works and socialism always slowly fails. There must be a way to purge the system from those who will suck all they can from society but never add one bit of their own work.
No, you just need to be able to quantify them and then modify the equations appropriately so they are nullified (from an economics perspective).
Few "normal" people are going to be satisfied with a "basic income" when only marginally more effort (say, flipping burgers, or driving a cab) delivers a meaningfully better lifestyle.
None of this could have happened without deregulation of the telephone system. We wouldn't be having this conversation right now if we still have a government monopoly in telephone systems.
Complete and utter rubbish. Do not conflate what happened in the US with what "must" happen.