The determined ones will just murder you outright if they think you're armed.
The same sort of problem happens with three time losers. They face long prison times if they get caught, so they'll take extreme chances to prevent going back to prison. This includes murdering cops, counter clerks, and little old ladies who could identify them.
Though I'm in Canada, we do have a lot of similarities in our justice system with the US, and I'm guessing the reason you don't hear a lot of support for lower sentences is that typically the minimum mandatory sentence for crimes is reasonable (within the public scope) or non-existent.
I have a teen-ager who is going through the legal system for various unsavory activities. He's been before judges several times, and despite the recommendations of counsellers, social workers, and other professionals that he be incarcerated during counselling and treatment, the judges just want to take the quickest shortcut possible to get the case out the door with the least amount of paperwork. In the first case, this involved releasing him back into the home, despite evidence that he presents a clear and present danger to others, and with no impulse control to speak of, is at a high risk to reoffend.
While sitting in the same courtroom on several different occasions I saw several cases of people being given the absolute minimum sentence or simply being let go due to spending a week or two in lockup awaiting a plea.
While a politician can use the "get tough on crime" policy to get elected, judges mete out "justice" arbitrarily, and from my experience based on their current mood. And if it means tossing out a charge in order to effect a lighter sentence, so be it.
The inequality of sentencing is ridiculous as well. Those whose actions affect none but themselves, over those whose actions affect others. Canada may have lax laws governing marijuana, but from what I have seen of US senten cing an individual who grows his own cannabis on his own property, smokes it himself, and gets arrested, is more likely to spend time in jail than a businessman who steals hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors, some of them retirees with no income and no future.
Old outdated laws plague both systems, and new, untested laws enter the books pell mell.
What we need are elected review boards who examine all laws older than five years for relevance to society as it stands, and establish that no law governing any aspect of society be established by someone unpossessed of a working knowledge of the field at hand.
I don't want to see any more old men ruling over how modern technology should be used in society, when the most complex device they understand how to use is a microwave.
Minimum or maximum sentences is less of an issue than the knowledge of the people that wield them over us.
Those who put everyone else in some category of their choosing, and those who don't.
Aside from that... what is it about their statement that makes it worthy of karma-whoring. It's not interesting, insightful, funny or anything. So why pigeonhole someone on an assumption that their comment is of such great import to us?
It's interesting to see IBM as an underdog, when you're familiar with their glorious days of yore. But it's even more interesting to see that as a company, they've learned from the mistakes they made that brought them down to that position in the first place.
I liked OS/2. Hell, I *loved* it. After messing around with Windows 3.1s slIP support, and the mess that it was, OS/2 was like a dream. The shell was replaceable, and as easy to swap as renaming the file. The PPP support was excellent, and the TCPIP stack was a hell of a lot more robust than the kludgy win3.1.
But it was shit with games. You had to hope for ports or use tricks to make them run.
That didn't bother me a heck of a lot, but it make being an OS/2 evangelist hard. IBMs lack of support didn't help either.
But now they see the chance to give the bully in the playground the proverbial wedgie, and they're building up a force of little guys to help them.
And from the looks of it, they're doing a bang up job. Go IBM! For tomorrow we will scorn you for your success!
If anyone is familiar with the works of L. Sprague de Camp, he also penned a classic story of going back in time to hunt dinosaur, and what happens when one of the hunters decides to kill his expedition.
Bradbury's story was published in 1952's 'R is for Rocket', while de Camp's published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1956.
I wonder if the similarities were intentional or accidental, seeing as both were well known in the "sci-fi" genre at the time.
there's an annoying bug in the blocking feature on Hotmail.
If you have exclusive settings, and a mail you want gets put in the junk folder, opening that email while in the junk folder, then deleting it when you're done opens the next mail in the folder... and loads the images. I ended up verifying my address to some asshole drug/sex company because of this.
Oh well, their shit will still never make it to my inbox. I only have 3 addresses whitelisted for that account.
You close your eyes, and there it is, as if seen from your peripheral vision? The brain is a funny thing.
Sometimes the image is stamped there by trauma. And if it is, is there any way to replace that image with something else. For example, if you've seen the goatse.cx pic, any time someone alludes to it, there it is, filling your minds eye. It's unavoidable. How do we replace that with a mental image of cute, fuzzy kittens?
The site is obviously an ad, but they did a fairly good job at predicting my low points in the day.
At 2:30 in the afternoon, I'm usually completely wiped out, and occasionally I'll end up face down on the keyboard.
I used to sleep so much better when I was physically active. Now, it's get up, commute, sit like lump at desk all day, become unmotivated due to typical work day, get home, sit around the home or at the computer all evening because I've got no energy.
Life was better when I went rollerblading every day, before my knees went to hell.
I bet exercise a few times a week would be a hell of a lot more effective than that little caffeine pill.
And someone should do a study on what professions tend to get better sleep. I bet a construction worker will have insomnia 10 times less than a desk jockey.
Yes, but some of them are so stupid that they do it in a way that allows them to be tracked down and prosecuted. A family in Waterloo, Ontario got caught spamming recently.
Having laws on the books may not stop the ones who don't get caught, but the ones who do will, in all likelyhood, never do it again.
Those little studs are great. There's some newly paves roads in our area that have long curves with steep dropoffs and the painted lines really don't show up well on rainy nights.
They placed the road studs on one of these roads and they practically glow compared to the paint. If the self-illuminating kind become readily available and easily placed it would be great for areas that see a lot of inclement weather.
Might cut down on the number of oncoming cars that drift into my lane on during the commute home as well. Now if we could just jam cell phone use in cars.
I should have clarified. it will play them but only very basically.
I was testing it with firefly and the first episode played fine, but the second and third were in spanish. there was no way to bypass it as changing the audio track isn't supported.
The solderless chips like the Xbit, and some of the newer models are incredibly easy to install. With Slayers EvoX install disk, you're up and running within the hour.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never understood the "free as in beer" analogy.
For one thing, you pay for beer.
The beer is only good for one use.
The effects are fleeting, and the byproduct is useless.
And usually, if someone's giving you free beer, it's because they want something.
So what the heck does "free as in beer" mean? (Honestly, not trolling)
It's been done.
:)
I recall reading about a burgler who fell through a skylight on to a knife rack and sued the lady who owned the house for 3 million dollars.
I highly doubt it even made it past the first appearance before a judge before being dismissed.
People who have booby trapped their homes against burglars have been successfully prosecuted for injuring or killing intruders as well.
The windows on my new home will have "This home protected by Goliath Tarantula" with a picture of the spider in question.
If you're on even footing, then by all means resist.
If they pull a gun, take something of valuable and toss it AT THEIR FEET.
When their eyes leave you, run like hell putting as many obstacles between you and them as possible.
Unless they're a trained shot, they have about a 10 % chance of hitting you, compared to a virtual bullseye at close range.
And this was instructions given to a bunch of us at a youth group self defense symposium by a veteran cop years ago.
Still seems like good sense now.
You can take your chances at hand to hand if you want, but a guy with a gun is just too unpredictable.
Flawed logic.
The determined ones will just murder you outright if they think you're armed.
The same sort of problem happens with three time losers. They face long prison times if they get caught, so they'll take extreme chances to prevent going back to prison. This includes murdering cops, counter clerks, and little old ladies who could identify them.
Just think of what an SF event would be like though.
A woman walks past, and the men approximate the flocking AI of a bad first person shooter.
It would look like pigeons squabbling over a muffin.
Though I'm in Canada, we do have a lot of similarities in our justice system with the US, and I'm guessing the reason you don't hear a lot of support for lower sentences is that typically the minimum mandatory sentence for crimes is reasonable (within the public scope) or non-existent.
I have a teen-ager who is going through the legal system for various unsavory activities. He's been before judges several times, and despite the recommendations of counsellers, social workers, and other professionals that he be incarcerated during counselling and treatment, the judges just want to take the quickest shortcut possible to get the case out the door with the least amount of paperwork. In the first case, this involved releasing him back into the home, despite evidence that he presents a clear and present danger to others, and with no impulse control to speak of, is at a high risk to reoffend.
While sitting in the same courtroom on several different occasions I saw several cases of people being given the absolute minimum sentence or simply being let go due to spending a week or two in lockup awaiting a plea.
While a politician can use the "get tough on crime" policy to get elected, judges mete out "justice" arbitrarily, and from my experience based on their current mood. And if it means tossing out a charge in order to effect a lighter sentence, so be it.
The inequality of sentencing is ridiculous as well. Those whose actions affect none but themselves, over those whose actions affect others. Canada may have lax laws governing marijuana, but from what I have seen of US senten cing an individual who grows his own cannabis on his own property, smokes it himself, and gets arrested, is more likely to spend time in jail than a businessman who steals hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors, some of them retirees with no income and no future.
Old outdated laws plague both systems, and new, untested laws enter the books pell mell.
What we need are elected review boards who examine all laws older than five years for relevance to society as it stands, and establish that no law governing any aspect of society be established by someone unpossessed of a working knowledge of the field at hand.
I don't want to see any more old men ruling over how modern technology should be used in society, when the most complex device they understand how to use is a microwave.
Minimum or maximum sentences is less of an issue than the knowledge of the people that wield them over us.
There are two kinds of people in the world:
Those who put everyone else in some category of their choosing, and those who don't.
Aside from that... what is it about their statement that makes it worthy of karma-whoring. It's not interesting, insightful, funny or anything. So why pigeonhole someone on an assumption that their comment is of such great import to us?
yeah, sorry, I should have been more specific than "kludgy" :)
First thing we do... bring back Descent.
It's interesting to see IBM as an underdog, when you're familiar with their glorious days of yore. But it's even more interesting to see that as a company, they've learned from the mistakes they made that brought them down to that position in the first place.
I liked OS/2. Hell, I *loved* it. After messing around with Windows 3.1s slIP support, and the mess that it was, OS/2 was like a dream. The shell was replaceable, and as easy to swap as renaming the file. The PPP support was excellent, and the TCPIP stack was a hell of a lot more robust than the kludgy win3.1.
But it was shit with games. You had to hope for ports or use tricks to make them run.
That didn't bother me a heck of a lot, but it make being an OS/2 evangelist hard. IBMs lack of support didn't help either.
But now they see the chance to give the bully in the playground the proverbial wedgie, and they're building up a force of little guys to help them.
And from the looks of it, they're doing a bang up job. Go IBM! For tomorrow we will scorn you for your success!
I hereby decree all future college exams must be taken in the nude! Especially liberal arts!
On the other hand, all engineering and comp-sci students are exempt from this ruling. *shudder*
If anyone is familiar with the works of L. Sprague de Camp, he also penned a classic story of going back in time to hunt dinosaur, and what happens when one of the hunters decides to kill his expedition.
Bradbury's story was published in 1952's 'R is for Rocket', while de Camp's published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1956.
I wonder if the similarities were intentional or accidental, seeing as both were well known in the "sci-fi" genre at the time.
Aha! I'd looked at headers but they'd been inconsistent depending on the source. Thanks!
Any idea how to have Mozilla kill all email with attachments?
I was surprised to see that there doesn't seem to be an option to do so. Just filtering by keywords.
there's an annoying bug in the blocking feature on Hotmail.
If you have exclusive settings, and a mail you want gets put in the junk folder, opening that email while in the junk folder, then deleting it when you're done opens the next mail in the folder... and loads the images. I ended up verifying my address to some asshole drug/sex company because of this.
Oh well, their shit will still never make it to my inbox. I only have 3 addresses whitelisted for that account.
You close your eyes, and there it is, as if seen from your peripheral vision? The brain is a funny thing.
Sometimes the image is stamped there by trauma. And if it is, is there any way to replace that image with something else. For example, if you've seen the goatse.cx pic, any time someone alludes to it, there it is, filling your minds eye. It's unavoidable. How do we replace that with a mental image of cute, fuzzy kittens?
will result in your wife leaving you, your truck breaking down, and your dog being hit by a train?
:)
I see someone's been listening to too much country music.
The site is obviously an ad, but they did a fairly good job at predicting my low points in the day.
At 2:30 in the afternoon, I'm usually completely wiped out, and occasionally I'll end up face down on the keyboard.
I used to sleep so much better when I was physically active. Now, it's get up, commute, sit like lump at desk all day, become unmotivated due to typical work day, get home, sit around the home or at the computer all evening because I've got no energy.
Life was better when I went rollerblading every day, before my knees went to hell.
I bet exercise a few times a week would be a hell of a lot more effective than that little caffeine pill.
And someone should do a study on what professions tend to get better sleep. I bet a construction worker will have insomnia 10 times less than a desk jockey.
unique indicates something is one of a kind... so how can you describe something more or less unique?
and then quibble about how to say it?
Yes, but some of them are so stupid that they do it in a way that allows them to be tracked down and prosecuted. A family in Waterloo, Ontario got caught spamming recently.
Having laws on the books may not stop the ones who don't get caught, but the ones who do will, in all likelyhood, never do it again.
I walked in on the whole thing late, but is Alexis de Tocqueville a legitimate place, or has The Toque engineered a big hoax?
Those little studs are great. There's some newly paves roads in our area that have long curves with steep dropoffs and the painted lines really don't show up well on rainy nights.
They placed the road studs on one of these roads and they practically glow compared to the paint. If the self-illuminating kind become readily available and easily placed it would be great for areas that see a lot of inclement weather.
Might cut down on the number of oncoming cars that drift into my lane on during the commute home as well. Now if we could just jam cell phone use in cars.
Typically, once an arsonist starts a fire, they leave the building rather than watch it burn down around them.
SCO seems to be running around locking all the doors, and they're the only ones in the building.
I should have clarified. it will play them but only very basically.
I was testing it with firefly and the first episode played fine, but the second and third were in spanish. there was no way to bypass it as changing the audio track isn't supported.
The solderless chips like the Xbit, and some of the newer models are incredibly easy to install. With Slayers EvoX install disk, you're up and running within the hour.