Actually, I think there was a drive toward rehabilitation in prison from the 60's to the late 80's, especially at the federal level. They claimed three purposes of incarceration; the three R's: Restraint (I'm not robbing more banks while I'm locked up), Retribution (punishment to help victims feel closure and serve as a deterrent to other), Rehabilitation (changing me so I am less likely to break the law after my eventual release).
Restraint clearly works. I robbed 0 banks during the entire time I was in prison. Retribution seems to work. I can't tell you how many people have told me they have always wanted to rob a bank but were too scared of the punishment. Rehabilitation pretty much left the federal system in 1987. Reagan and a couple of Supreme Court decisions effectively removed both the expectation and the reality of rehabilitative efforts. They gutted the the programming available to inmates, which had been quite extensive in some places.
I don't think any serious academics believe rehabilitation is currently a purpose of prison, even remotely. There are a few effective rehabilitative programs--good drug courts, for example--but they are the exception, not the rule.
I grew up with these types of stories since the cold wars days. But were told that it was all cia propaganda and that they would never do anything like that.
Yes, propaganda is a very real part of everyday life, both state-sponsored and corporate-sponsored, throughout the developed world. Many newspaper articles are heavily influenced by it even when someone writing a story doesn't realize it, because fundamentally reporters have very little time to spend on each story. Most of this propaganda has political objectives.
That doesn't make it okay. It is something that causes harm and that there should be both protection from and defenses for. A foreign government that uses propaganda to destabilize a country should be treated as a kind of attack and an appropriate proportional response (although it may be of a different kind) should be employed until you are able to negotiate a de-escalation. Here, the evidence appears to show that there have been propaganda and electronic attacks on the United States and it should respond intelligently.
I've heard a lot about how "evil" Nestle is for these practices. But as usual, we're simply dealing with shrewd businesses taking advantage of situations where they can make huge profits because the law of the land doesn't prevent any of it.
IMO, laws can be changed at any time -- so blame the governments for this.
Having had nice refreshing drinks from water buffaloes on a hot day (what we called an old military water tank on a trailer), I can say there are clearly alternatives to water bottles that result in a LOT less pollution. There should be a more meaningful tax on small water bottles sold outside of an emergency situation.
Incidentally, very few things are as annoying as people who buy a lot of water bottles and leave them half-empty all over the place. (Yes, these people exist.)
Ctrl+Alt+Delete is a combination used for historical reasons.
It is the most secure way of doing a login because it triggered an "interrupt" in the system, like a signal that could not be caught by the program running in the foreground. So programs couldn't fake the login screen.
But it was an interrupt--and one that took three keys--because it was used in the old days to reboot a system with a hung program. You wouldn't WANT a computer to reboot when you pressed one key, because then a random mistaken keypress could lose hours of work. (This was before autosave, remember.)
The common way of doing this today on linux is still what, Alt+Sysrq+b? Or for killing X, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace? They're still a 3-key combinations.
It's been thirty+ years and we should just change system or keyboard designs, but it wasn't a mistake.
Yes, bad reviews are terrible for a business, and often unfair. Lawsuits are usually the wrong way to respond to those, and positive reviews from satisfied customers are usually a great way to respond to those--but lawsuits are an option if someone keeps making illegitimate complaints and it hurts your business enough, or if someone is using them to harass your employees, for example.
There is nothing like the undiminished beauty of the night sky. Go find an open field somewhere and go stargazing, if you've never been. Learn the constellations if you have time, yes, but just seeing the entire vista, lying down and opening your eyes as wide as you can and consciously taking in visually as much as the sky as you can is amazing. It's criminal that so many kids never get to see that.
Some is worthless, some is not. For example, Amazon advertises products you have looked at in your Facebook feed, and I'm sure those ads are well worth it for Amazon.
Anything 'multimedia' should get a placeholder that needs to be clicked before it even starts to download, never mind play.
Anything cross-site should be blocked - scripts, images, style sheets... I don't care. Host it on your own server or proxy it or it shouldn't display. And in addition to being hosted on the same site, a script shouldn't be allowed to request resources from any site but the one it is loaded from.
Cookies... I can't think of a good way to stop cookies from being used as trackers except to have it be standard that they use plain language tags and browsers offer a pop-up to show the cookies the site you're currently on is using or has placed on your system, along with the ability to delete any values you want.
Google provides analytics, advertising, and identity provision (among other things). All of these services are implemented as cross-site, at least in part.
Not really--suppose they are not turning enough of a profit on the cheaper model to justify turning out the line. Then the cheaper model lets them increase economies of scale and also make the car available to more people (driving down the production cost of the more expensive model and possibly its cost if the external market forces are right), while the more expensive model pays enough to justify having the line and gives you an economy of scale to knock down the price of the cheap model a bit. If you sold just the expensive model to everyone it might then need to be at a higher price point than the cheaper model, which would make it unavailable to people who would otherwise be able to buy the cheap one and reduce the number of consumers able to purchase the car.
Or suppose that they could sell the cheap one with a cheaper battery at the same price point, but by including the bigger battery they make it cheaper to produce due to economies of scale. The customer is still getting the cheaper car but with it being easier to upgrade than it otherwise would be, and the company is producing it more inexpensively. Because of the easy upgrade, the customer actually has a benefit as compared to if the company had decided to sell it with 100% control of a smaller battery.
I understand the urge to hate companies that introduce unnecessary structural monopolies into the marketplace and are unnecessarily hostile to the right to repair or the right to fully control your own property--but just because a decision sets off our radar about that doesn't mean the decision is necessarily harmful to consumers.
Sue John Doe and the firm that hired him. Also make police reports to various agencies.
They used a Godaddy account and Microsoft hosting. You think there isn't a money trail or a log of connections to the host? Some two-bit fraudster thought this was a good idea. You've got a pretty good chance that they made mistakes.
Advertising/marketing should be about 0.001% its current worth.
No, it should have a lot of value, it should just have more meaningful ethics rules. Perhaps even require a certain amount of actual, verifiable information per unit of advertisement, for example. Right now the only prohibitions are on untrue advertisements, those rules are usually difficult to enforce, and the incentivize the creation of content-less advertisement. Partly as a result of that, advertising has evolved to have less and less content over the last hundred and fifty years.
Realize advertisement is commercial speech, so the first amendment protections are narrower than they are for personal or political speech. As a practical matter though, more advertising limitations are created by commercial entities (e.g. Google) than by governments.
So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly? It is far from "basically nothing", especially in the aggregate. If you disagree, I challenge you to start and run your own high-quality publication for a decade in a financially responsible way. I have.
There are many options. It does have to get paid for, but copyright may not be the best way to do it--in fact, we know it isn't, because it restrict access to information that is literally there to advance human knowledge. Perhaps schools and individuals who wish to publish could subscribe to publishing cooperatives, for example.
In the alternative, scientific papers could more sensibly be treated like patents--a short period of monopoly, followed by public use.
The big problem is the politics of trying to get it done, not that there's any intrinsic preference for copyright-based pricing of access to scientific knowledge.
I dunno. I see AI with decicion making powers happening at the tactical and theatre levels: semi autonomous weapons that are given a mission and the execute it with leeway to adjust along the way, or an AI coordinating troops and autonomous units. Enough options for a rogue AI to cause terrible damage, but not really something that will spark WW3 before humans can intervene.
At the strategic level, AI could well support decision making, but what would be the value of actually putting the AI in charge there? That makes sense only if you need to make split second decisions, or launch a counterstrike even if all meatbag commanders are dead. That's a cold war standoff scenario; I don't see it being really useful for anything else.
You're thinking of the incremental advances from current AI. That will certainly be leveraged, but eventually we will come up with general AI in a way which can be accomplished using available resources. That's decades away according to most people, but any country that develops it first can literally out-think the others in everything, unless they don't have enough lead time. Every government in the world would go to war for that power or to keep that power out of the hands of another.
"Twenty years later, I can say X is exactly what I would have done with my knowledge 20 years ago" is just not super reliable evidence, because of hindsight bias. While I think there should be a little more room for testimony that "of course this was obvious. My grandmother could have designed this with both hands tied behind her back while she was falling," patent law frowns on using guesses about what was or wasn't obvious in the past.
That's why they look to things like suggestions from the time in question about combining two things or solving a problem a certain way, rather than asking engineers today who are used to everyone walking around with an accelerometer in their pocket how they would solve the problem.
The key here is lack of competing services (lack of landline phones for the cell phone case). Delivering something by drone is attractive when the alternative is in the backpack of someone hiking down a footpath. Not so attractive when a UPS or USPS truck will be driving by there every day anyway.
Competition is a huge part of it. I can Fedex something anywhere in the country overnight, so a drone system isn't much of an improvement. (It might get it to someplace very remote a few hours earlier or more cheaply, but that's it. So there's value, but it's not as huge a gap as from four-times-a-year to several-times-per-week).
Regulations are another very real part. The more complex a regulation, the larger a barrier to entry for a new technology. Even if every regulation is there for a reason it takes a lot of time and money to try to find a way through them, and it may be impossible or impractical to have the regulations changed quickly enough to make a business model work.
And of course there's founder drive. People may realize they can save more lives in Africa and that's what they want to do and what they've sold to their investors.
So long as the wireless vendors continue to stick it to their customers with artificial constrainst and service downgrades, wireless is not going to be the replacement for fixed-line Internet access that many have been predicting.
This is also a really bad marketing move right before the Game of Thrones finale. My guess is Verizon has been losing too much money with every Game of Thrones episode.
You said 'Court' but I want to point out, it's not for the judge to decide, it's for the Jury. This is why we have Jury trials.
Jury trials happen in a tiny percentage of cases. Insisting on a jury trial means you're willing to risk years (or perhaps decades) of your life for the chance that the jury will agree with you. People generally only do that if they're looking at VERY serious time. VERY occasionally you run into someone who refuses to settle because they're innocent, and are willing to roll the dice a jury will believe them. And then they go to jail for longer than if they had been guilty.
I'm no detective or anything but I can imagine that these skills are "use it or lose it" like any other. If they aren't doing anything of a higher priority then why not?
I can also imagine that there is matter of pride.
Good practice, no. There are plenty of cases you can work on today to get good practice. It's not like there's a crime shortage.
Pride is a part of it, so is disincentive. Criminal law is generally about two things: retributionism and consequentialism. Punishing the guy because you are angry with him and he deserves it (retributivism) is very rarely a sensible motive--it's mostly petty revenge because someone offends our notions of right and wrong and to hell with whether it makes sense. There are lawbreakers we may WANT to lock away for decades or to kill, but it's not always helpful. Consequentialism (side-constrained by a requirement that the defendant is also supposed to be guilty) tells us to punish the guy so he doesn't do it again, and to scare the hell out of the next ten guys who think about trying it. This is why it's much harder to plea-bargain a high-profile case; not only does the prosecutor want to look good, but because the hope is that the punishment is enough to discourage others from engaging in the bad act.
Oh, and sometimes the public believes there's rehabilitation. Occasionally there are nods toward it, and certainly there are attempts to reduce recidivism, but generally criminal law theory recognizes that rehabilitation in not really a meaningful component of the modern criminal justice system.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the complexity of implementation prohibited further development...
Interference with radio signals is also prohibited by federal law, and as a result there isn't a huge market for them in the US.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
https://www.fcc.gov/general/ja...
Actually, I think there was a drive toward rehabilitation in prison from the 60's to the late 80's, especially at the federal level. They claimed three purposes of incarceration; the three R's: Restraint (I'm not robbing more banks while I'm locked up), Retribution (punishment to help victims feel closure and serve as a deterrent to other), Rehabilitation (changing me so I am less likely to break the law after my eventual release).
Restraint clearly works. I robbed 0 banks during the entire time I was in prison.
Retribution seems to work. I can't tell you how many people have told me they have always wanted to rob a bank but were too scared of the punishment.
Rehabilitation pretty much left the federal system in 1987. Reagan and a couple of Supreme Court decisions effectively removed both the expectation and the reality of rehabilitative efforts. They gutted the the programming available to inmates, which had been quite extensive in some places.
I don't think any serious academics believe rehabilitation is currently a purpose of prison, even remotely. There are a few effective rehabilitative programs--good drug courts, for example--but they are the exception, not the rule.
The amount of spying in NYC (or London, or etc.) is one of the reasons why I avoid NYC (or London, or etc.)
This stuff will eventually be everywhere, of course, but I'll avoid it for as long as I can.
I mean, there's no reason to seek it out, but it's also not a great reason to avoid a place for 99.9% of people. We're just not that interesting.
It's hardly the first city with flying taxis. You can book helicopter flights in NYC now, for example. They're just pricey.
I grew up with these types of stories since the cold wars days. But were told that it was all cia propaganda and that they would never do anything like that.
Yes, propaganda is a very real part of everyday life, both state-sponsored and corporate-sponsored, throughout the developed world. Many newspaper articles are heavily influenced by it even when someone writing a story doesn't realize it, because fundamentally reporters have very little time to spend on each story. Most of this propaganda has political objectives.
That doesn't make it okay. It is something that causes harm and that there should be both protection from and defenses for. A foreign government that uses propaganda to destabilize a country should be treated as a kind of attack and an appropriate proportional response (although it may be of a different kind) should be employed until you are able to negotiate a de-escalation. Here, the evidence appears to show that there have been propaganda and electronic attacks on the United States and it should respond intelligently.
I've heard a lot about how "evil" Nestle is for these practices. But as usual, we're simply dealing with shrewd businesses taking advantage of situations where they can make huge profits because the law of the land doesn't prevent any of it.
IMO, laws can be changed at any time -- so blame the governments for this.
Having had nice refreshing drinks from water buffaloes on a hot day (what we called an old military water tank on a trailer), I can say there are clearly alternatives to water bottles that result in a LOT less pollution. There should be a more meaningful tax on small water bottles sold outside of an emergency situation.
Incidentally, very few things are as annoying as people who buy a lot of water bottles and leave them half-empty all over the place. (Yes, these people exist.)
Ctrl+Alt+Delete is a combination used for historical reasons.
It is the most secure way of doing a login because it triggered an "interrupt" in the system, like a signal that could not be caught by the program running in the foreground. So programs couldn't fake the login screen.
But it was an interrupt--and one that took three keys--because it was used in the old days to reboot a system with a hung program. You wouldn't WANT a computer to reboot when you pressed one key, because then a random mistaken keypress could lose hours of work. (This was before autosave, remember.)
The common way of doing this today on linux is still what, Alt+Sysrq+b? Or for killing X, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace? They're still a 3-key combinations.
It's been thirty+ years and we should just change system or keyboard designs, but it wasn't a mistake.
Yes, bad reviews are terrible for a business, and often unfair. Lawsuits are usually the wrong way to respond to those, and positive reviews from satisfied customers are usually a great way to respond to those--but lawsuits are an option if someone keeps making illegitimate complaints and it hurts your business enough, or if someone is using them to harass your employees, for example.
You know what's not an option?
Forging court orders.
Like every other vending machine owner they will need to strike deals to place their machines and deal with restocking and broken machines.
Ssssh, we're calling this one a "Startup."
And to be fair, there is room for innovation in the vending machine space.
Live-debugging my X config file in front of a room of open-source users is not my idea of a good time.
They'd be perfectly civilized until you picked between vi and emacs...
(And to be clear, this open field should not be central park, where you can see ten stars. It should be hours to the North, where can see thousands.)
There is nothing like the undiminished beauty of the night sky. Go find an open field somewhere and go stargazing, if you've never been. Learn the constellations if you have time, yes, but just seeing the entire vista, lying down and opening your eyes as wide as you can and consciously taking in visually as much as the sky as you can is amazing. It's criminal that so many kids never get to see that.
Some is worthless, some is not. For example, Amazon advertises products you have looked at in your Facebook feed, and I'm sure those ads are well worth it for Amazon.
Anything 'multimedia' should get a placeholder that needs to be clicked before it even starts to download, never mind play.
Anything cross-site should be blocked - scripts, images, style sheets... I don't care. Host it on your own server or proxy it or it shouldn't display. And in addition to being hosted on the same site, a script shouldn't be allowed to request resources from any site but the one it is loaded from.
Cookies... I can't think of a good way to stop cookies from being used as trackers except to have it be standard that they use plain language tags and browsers offer a pop-up to show the cookies the site you're currently on is using or has placed on your system, along with the ability to delete any values you want.
Google provides analytics, advertising, and identity provision (among other things). All of these services are implemented as cross-site, at least in part.
They also make Chrome.
The proof is the fact that they did it.
Not really--suppose they are not turning enough of a profit on the cheaper model to justify turning out the line. Then the cheaper model lets them increase economies of scale and also make the car available to more people (driving down the production cost of the more expensive model and possibly its cost if the external market forces are right), while the more expensive model pays enough to justify having the line and gives you an economy of scale to knock down the price of the cheap model a bit. If you sold just the expensive model to everyone it might then need to be at a higher price point than the cheaper model, which would make it unavailable to people who would otherwise be able to buy the cheap one and reduce the number of consumers able to purchase the car.
Or suppose that they could sell the cheap one with a cheaper battery at the same price point, but by including the bigger battery they make it cheaper to produce due to economies of scale. The customer is still getting the cheaper car but with it being easier to upgrade than it otherwise would be, and the company is producing it more inexpensively. Because of the easy upgrade, the customer actually has a benefit as compared to if the company had decided to sell it with 100% control of a smaller battery.
I understand the urge to hate companies that introduce unnecessary structural monopolies into the marketplace and are unnecessarily hostile to the right to repair or the right to fully control your own property--but just because a decision sets off our radar about that doesn't mean the decision is necessarily harmful to consumers.
Sue John Doe and the firm that hired him. Also make police reports to various agencies.
They used a Godaddy account and Microsoft hosting. You think there isn't a money trail or a log of connections to the host? Some two-bit fraudster thought this was a good idea. You've got a pretty good chance that they made mistakes.
Advertising/marketing should be about 0.001% its current worth.
No, it should have a lot of value, it should just have more meaningful ethics rules. Perhaps even require a certain amount of actual, verifiable information per unit of advertisement, for example. Right now the only prohibitions are on untrue advertisements, those rules are usually difficult to enforce, and the incentivize the creation of content-less advertisement. Partly as a result of that, advertising has evolved to have less and less content over the last hundred and fifty years.
Realize advertisement is commercial speech, so the first amendment protections are narrower than they are for personal or political speech. As a practical matter though, more advertising limitations are created by commercial entities (e.g. Google) than by governments.
So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly? It is far from "basically nothing", especially in the aggregate. If you disagree, I challenge you to start and run your own high-quality publication for a decade in a financially responsible way. I have.
There are many options. It does have to get paid for, but copyright may not be the best way to do it--in fact, we know it isn't, because it restrict access to information that is literally there to advance human knowledge. Perhaps schools and individuals who wish to publish could subscribe to publishing cooperatives, for example.
In the alternative, scientific papers could more sensibly be treated like patents--a short period of monopoly, followed by public use.
The big problem is the politics of trying to get it done, not that there's any intrinsic preference for copyright-based pricing of access to scientific knowledge.
I dunno. I see AI with decicion making powers happening at the tactical and theatre levels: semi autonomous weapons that are given a mission and the execute it with leeway to adjust along the way, or an AI coordinating troops and autonomous units. Enough options for a rogue AI to cause terrible damage, but not really something that will spark WW3 before humans can intervene.
At the strategic level, AI could well support decision making, but what would be the value of actually putting the AI in charge there? That makes sense only if you need to make split second decisions, or launch a counterstrike even if all meatbag commanders are dead. That's a cold war standoff scenario; I don't see it being really useful for anything else.
You're thinking of the incremental advances from current AI. That will certainly be leveraged, but eventually we will come up with general AI in a way which can be accomplished using available resources. That's decades away according to most people, but any country that develops it first can literally out-think the others in everything, unless they don't have enough lead time. Every government in the world would go to war for that power or to keep that power out of the hands of another.
"Twenty years later, I can say X is exactly what I would have done with my knowledge 20 years ago" is just not super reliable evidence, because of hindsight bias. While I think there should be a little more room for testimony that "of course this was obvious. My grandmother could have designed this with both hands tied behind her back while she was falling," patent law frowns on using guesses about what was or wasn't obvious in the past.
That's why they look to things like suggestions from the time in question about combining two things or solving a problem a certain way, rather than asking engineers today who are used to everyone walking around with an accelerometer in their pocket how they would solve the problem.
The key here is lack of competing services (lack of landline phones for the cell phone case). Delivering something by drone is attractive when the alternative is in the backpack of someone hiking down a footpath. Not so attractive when a UPS or USPS truck will be driving by there every day anyway.
Competition is a huge part of it. I can Fedex something anywhere in the country overnight, so a drone system isn't much of an improvement. (It might get it to someplace very remote a few hours earlier or more cheaply, but that's it. So there's value, but it's not as huge a gap as from four-times-a-year to several-times-per-week).
Regulations are another very real part. The more complex a regulation, the larger a barrier to entry for a new technology. Even if every regulation is there for a reason it takes a lot of time and money to try to find a way through them, and it may be impossible or impractical to have the regulations changed quickly enough to make a business model work.
And of course there's founder drive. People may realize they can save more lives in Africa and that's what they want to do and what they've sold to their investors.
So long as the wireless vendors continue to stick it to their customers with artificial constrainst and service downgrades, wireless is not going to be the replacement for fixed-line Internet access that many have been predicting.
This is also a really bad marketing move right before the Game of Thrones finale. My guess is Verizon has been losing too much money with every Game of Thrones episode.
You said 'Court' but I want to point out, it's not for the judge to decide, it's for the Jury. This is why we have Jury trials.
Jury trials happen in a tiny percentage of cases. Insisting on a jury trial means you're willing to risk years (or perhaps decades) of your life for the chance that the jury will agree with you. People generally only do that if they're looking at VERY serious time. VERY occasionally you run into someone who refuses to settle because they're innocent, and are willing to roll the dice a jury will believe them. And then they go to jail for longer than if they had been guilty.
why continue the case?
Because it's good practice for more recent cases?
I'm no detective or anything but I can imagine that these skills are "use it or lose it" like any other. If they aren't doing anything of a higher priority then why not?
I can also imagine that there is matter of pride.
Good practice, no. There are plenty of cases you can work on today to get good practice. It's not like there's a crime shortage.
Pride is a part of it, so is disincentive. Criminal law is generally about two things: retributionism and consequentialism. Punishing the guy because you are angry with him and he deserves it (retributivism) is very rarely a sensible motive--it's mostly petty revenge because someone offends our notions of right and wrong and to hell with whether it makes sense. There are lawbreakers we may WANT to lock away for decades or to kill, but it's not always helpful. Consequentialism (side-constrained by a requirement that the defendant is also supposed to be guilty) tells us to punish the guy so he doesn't do it again, and to scare the hell out of the next ten guys who think about trying it. This is why it's much harder to plea-bargain a high-profile case; not only does the prosecutor want to look good, but because the hope is that the punishment is enough to discourage others from engaging in the bad act.
Oh, and sometimes the public believes there's rehabilitation. Occasionally there are nods toward it, and certainly there are attempts to reduce recidivism, but generally criminal law theory recognizes that rehabilitation in not really a meaningful component of the modern criminal justice system.
Hey, it's going to cost $700 per minute but at least there will be no errors!
So it's about three times cheaper than the lawyer that you'd need if you get sued for a bad transcription?
This will eventually bring down the costs of lawsuits by making court reporters less common, but that may take a few decades.
Not many lawyers are $700 per minute. Even $700 per hour is rare.
And do you know how much we have to pay to go through law school and have our senses of humor surgically removed?